


The Goose Girl

by aurora_borealis



Series: bird girls [2]
Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 13:28:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 71,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22496863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis
Summary: "You are named for a single place but you never stay in one place for long. "Bohuslava "Slava" Pavlikovskaya's life across the years, and how her life came to be intertwined with Theodora Decker.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Series: bird girls [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1617583
Comments: 15
Kudos: 29





	1. Blodeuwedd

**Author's Note:**

> I began this during the fall of 2019 and finished writing it early in January.
> 
> Content warning throughout the story including upcoming chapters for: addiction, sexual assault/grooming, domestic violence.

I: Blodeuwedd

 _“You will not dare to show your face ever again in the light of day ever again, and that will be because of enmity between you and all other birds. It will be in their nature to harass you and despise you wherever they find you. And you will not lose your name - that will always be "Bloddeuwedd””_ .-The Four Branches of the Mabinogi

_

You were born in the very final years of the Soviet Union. Fittingly, for a girl born in a country that no longer exists, you have no real home. Fittingly, for a girl without a mother, when your father is not drinking, he shrugs and says you do not have a girl’s way and it is too late for anything to be done about it. You laugh when you tell adults your name and they say you have a big name for such a little thing – although you keep getting taller, taller than all the other girls, who you shove to the ground, laughing, not realizing how forceful you are, when you are playing. But you never have friends for long. Their parents always learn very quickly who you are. Or they’re afraid of you.

One day your father is drinking, but you can tell he only just began. You don’t have to clean up any glass or spills and he isn’t sick yet- once Ilona, your mother, died you started doing those things. It’s only been a few months and already it seems like years. Sometimes if he is drunk he will cry and call you by your mother’s name and you are too afraid to correct him when he apologizes, really to her, on his knees weeping. When she was alive, though, she could only clean sometimes because she was often worse off than your father. It’s just one glass right now, you see. “Bohuslava,” he says, looking out the dusty window into the darkening sky of the evening. The city lights make it look less dark than it is. “Do you know what your name means?” You shake your head. Sometimes you like to be quiet.

“Bohuslav is a town, far away in Ukraine…it is where I spent my youth,” he says. You are now in Poland and have been for years.

“Are we going?” you ask, a little confused if this is one of the times your father is trying to teach you, help him understand the things he knows all about, because one day you’ll have to be like him and he’s sorry but if you know how to do it, it will be better.

He shakes his head no. “We can never go,” he tells you, his voice morose.

“Oh,” you say.

“Look at me,” he says, his voice intense, but thankfully, not angry. So you do. “Sometimes, Bohuslava, you have to run. And you can’t go back. No matter what. Sometimes you do things and nothing can be done to fix it so you have to start over, all over again, far away.”

You nod your head. “All right,” you tell him, a little nervous. You are probably going to move again soon. There are tears in his eyes and you think it isn’t because of the drinking, at least, not yet.

“You will have to do so many things you are still too young to understand, my Bohuslava,” he tells you. “But at least you will not make your mother’s mistakes. And I swear I will never let this happen, you will _never_ make mine. You are almost old enough…” You nod your head. Thankfully, he has to go out that night for work, so he doesn’t drink much more, at least for now. When he’s gone you go to the table and dip your finger into the glass and taste the remainder of the vodka that was in it.

Already, you understand that the reason why you and your father are hated everywhere you go is because he causes destruction everywhere he goes.

You are named for a single place but you never stay in one place for long.

_

  
No one has ever told you this before, and there’s no real evidence, and you would have no one to tell anyway:

  
Sometimes you think maybe she didn’t fall. Not necessarily that she meant to do it. But that sometimes when people are drunk they do things they wouldn’t do sober, sometimes sobriety is when people are more honest and clear. That’s what Judy has been telling you when sometimes you watch people trying to climb on top of the bar or making huge bets while watching the TV. They do things they don’t mean, but they do them intentionally all the same, even if their bodies mean it more than their minds do, or their minds are not in the correct order, like how your father is.

You know she wasn’t pushed. Your father wouldn't have, no matter what else he has done. And he wouldn’t have been able to hide it from you and he would have told you anyway. Because, he says to you so often, you look just like her. You didn’t, but you never correct him. He says it’s both your faults, because the both of you let her die. A shared blame. You don’t correct him on that, either. The whole world already hates you for being his daughter. You cannot fault them. That is what you are. You are his girl through and through, and he is always telling you about her because your face, if nothing else, reminds him of her.

You think sometimes- you don’t know, of course, there is not and never will be proof- she went out the window on purpose, that in that moment, some part of her, if not all of her wanted to do it.

You hope you never want to die. You hope you never lose control of yourself to the point where there’s no difference between you and someone who wants to die. You hope your father is right about you at least in one respect, that you are not and never can be like any normal girl no matter what that makes you, because sometimes you think you’d rather be hated by everyone than controlled by anyone.

“What are you thinking of, Slava?” Judy asks, kindly, her hand on your shoulder. Her twenty-eighth birthday is next week and there will be a party at the bar. She was telling you all about it, her plans to invite her friends, which includes you, you’re just not going to be given any drinks. (You don’t want to tell her, even though because of her you now have the vocabulary in English to know how, that you have plenty of places to find it anyway without her help).

You’re looking out the dusty window at the red sands. “Is very big country,” you tell her. “Did not realize before I came.” Judy showed you a map, one of the pictures on the wall of the bar.

“Well,” Judy tells you, “it’s a very big world out there. It still surprises you sometimes, doesn’t it?” Judy once told you she’d never been out of Australia. You wonder what her life would be if she had gone-maybe if she saw enough she wouldn’t be satisfied with this town, her husband, any more. Not that everyone in her place would feel the same. Maybe it’s just you, and you think that’s how you’d feel.

You nod your head yes. “I am used to going around. But there are always new things to find out.”

She looks at you fondly. “There always will be.” Then: “Is there anywhere in this world you’d love to go?”

“Not sure,” you say. Somewhere you are welcome. Somewhere you don’t want to leave immediately. Somewhere people don’t call you things you know are bad names but you don’t know the language well enough to understand. Somewhere that won’t be destroyed when you come and will be ruined when you leave. You just smile at her. “Place with many people.”

“That sounds nice,” she says, “a few years ago I took a trip down to Melbourne with friends…the city is always an exciting place to be.” She showed you some pictures in her album and it looked like the biggest city you’d ever seen that you could remember.

“City is different every place,” you say, “but yes.” Judy is your friend, and you know you’ll never end up like her, and part of you is glad for it, even if it makes you sad for her. Certainly she could find many men who would be her husband or boyfriend who are much better than the husband she has. All the people who come to the bar like her. She is the kind of person most people can like. This is something you can recognize. But you are the sort of person most people can’t like, and Judy is someone who not everyone does like, even if she hasn’t done anything to anyone. You’ve seen this happen. Some people just – as one of the American movies playing on the TV said once – get a rough deal. That expression is one of the English ones that make sense to you. Rough deals were some of the first things you learned. Rough, that can be handled, worked with. Rough is how things are. It is not to be wept over or shied away from. It just is. “I suppose one day I will see many cities the way my father must.” You shrug.

“Well,” Judy says after a moment, stroking your hair a little. Once she combed it and she sprayed something in it so it wouldn’t hurt, because it was so tangled, and that just made you laugh, and then you both laughed, and she said she had to use the product all the time because her curly hair (like Jodi on _McLeod’s Daughters_ ) gets so tangled. “You never know what can happen. You might not do things the way he does. My family used to be fishermen. My grandfather drowned and my father swore he’d never board a ship, not for all the money in the world.”

“Did he build the bar?” you ask. You’ve never heard this story before.

“No, dear,” Judy says gently, “my father didn’t make his living honest.” She’s quiet for a moment. “We all end up on different roads, is what I mean, Slava. You have your own. Things don’t always go the way the plan is, and sometimes that might not be so bad.” You nod. “Do you see what I mean?”

“Yah, Judy,” you say thoughtfully, drinking the Pepsi she gave you. At the other side of the bar two old men are talking about their lottery tickets while the radio plays an old rock song, the volume quiet. 

“Can we watch movie later today?” you ask. Sometimes on a slow day like today she plays a movie on the TV to help you with English. Yesterday it was this funny movie called _Muriel’s Wedding_.

“Sure, Slava,” Judy says, “but will you help with setting up the tables?”

“Da,” you tell her, happy to help her out because no one else does, and before you turn from the window you watch the few cars drive past the kangaroo crossing sign, red dust flying through the air with the turning of the wheels.

_

_4/29:_

_Dear Mom,_

_I’m staying at Andy’s house. I’m safe. It’s very strange without you and I’m very sad and lonely, but you should know no one is hurting me and I’m alive._

_They have me in Platt’s room because it’s the only one available now. They aren’t putting me in the guest room maybe because it’s so far away from the others and they want to be able to have a closer eye on me. Anyway, it’s weird being in his room even though he cleared out a lot of it because he’s in college now. I opened a drawer in the bureau to put some clothes in and there were all these Playboy issues just right there with the cover girls just staring at me, like hey there new roommate! It felt really weird. I just used a different drawer._

_Andy talks about college sometimes. I can’t believe it, but also I can, given that this is Andy. We’re just thirteen. I’m glad you never pressure me that way, the way some of these kids at our school are already in these expensive SAT tutoring classes, although I guess that’s just how they live._

_Thankfully it’s not a foster home. I know you’ll be so happy to know that. At least for the time being I’m safe from that. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to go. But I hope it won’t come to that. So I try not to ever complain at the Barbour’s house, and to do everything right, even though it will never be our home._

_I miss you so much. I can’t stop thinking about the both of us going home together. Remember when we went to Wellfleet and we had such a nice time driving all around the towns there and then when we got home I said I didn’t realize how much I missed it because I was having a nice time? It’s kind of like that, but maybe, the other way around._

_Mrs. Barbour has been buying me new clothes. I think part of this is because I haven’t been eating much so everything is kind of big on me, which I don’t mind, but I guess it doesn’t look right. She takes me to these stores and tells me what looks best on me and I try them on and I look like such a different person, I can hardly believe it. Of course, don’t worry, I always thank her. I know you’re not really friends, the two of you, but I know you would want me to be polite and nice. I am. They’re the kind of stores the things in your ads would be in. But sometimes when I see the displays I think no, no one’s going to want to buy it if it’s presented like that, those things don’t go together, and I think about how sometimes at work people don’t listen to you even though you had all those good ideas that were so successful when they did listen, like advertising the YSL scarves by having them worn as halter tops. Sometimes I hear about how people’s hair and eyes and looks change as they get older and I’m scared one day I won’t look anything like you at all and no one would ever know._

_The other night we went to the yacht club, Andy and his parents and brothers and me. And there was all this, “who’s this now”, and “oh, right”. I don’t belong there, it’s clear to me. Even if no one is trying to make me leave. I’m not supposed to be there. Sometimes I don’t know where I’m supposed to be._

_

Your father is all you have, and you are all he has. Aside from each other, you are essentially both alone in this world. So each of you are, in a way, both very alone. You think he understands that in you as you understand it in him. A silent understanding that you never bring up and he scarcely mentions, but one that is there all the same. The instinctual understanding a father passes down to his daughter and shares. It would probably still be there if things were better between the two of you, just not to the same degree.

In Alaska you spend a lot of time alone. Your father goes off for weeks on end. And so a few times you’ve hitchhiked into the city or tried to find a place to stay in the small, small town you’re in. Sometimes it makes you wish you were an adult so you wouldn’t have to be left alone this way, you could just be alone and not depend on anyone, and see things your own way. Sometimes you feel so afraid and lost you wish that when you lay down on the cold ground, the lights in the sky would just take you away like a fish in the current, the way you sometimes watched happen when they swam in the oceans in Papua New Guinea. It almost makes you feel safe, lying down and looking at them. Some bad things have happened, with or without your father. But then, you think, that is the world. Bad things always do happen. The thing is, how to live through them.

“Bohuslava,” he says to you, sober, solemnly in a valley near your current home, the sky a cold blue, the dark green earth and ice blue waters and white ice and rare tan grasses stretching out forever. In warmer weather, there are purple wildflowers. But now, it is cold, but not so cold that you cannot handle it. And you listen. It is just the two of you in this field, and in the distance, if you ran far enough, you would be climbing the higher grounds, closer to the sky. Somewhere, close, but not in sight, there are certainly people. There always are, all around the world, even if you are in a place where you are alone. There is no place that is empty.

“Yes, father,” you say, strands of your hair blown about by the cool winds. The air is not ice, so much as, cold water, the kind you wash your face with when the sink works.

He positions your hands, your arms, and places his rifle in your hand. Well, he owns it, but it’s not _his_ rifle he uses, you’re certain he barely ever carries large weapons. “A woman must shoot if she is to know danger,” he advises you. “That way you can stay far away. You do not have to risk being maimed by men twice as big as you, twice as strong. But you can survive. You can survive better than any of them if you aim right and if you are a good shot. Because of this, women often are.” You hadn’t thought of it that way, always seeing men carry guns, always watching movies where the men fire pistols and sling rifles, but you suppose it makes sense. Survive, and do what you must, and be precise.

You are holding it as he has guided you and are standing still against him. “Aim, now,” he says, his intense voice full of something like trust, gesturing with one hand on your shoulder and the other towards a tree, “take your shot, Bohuslava.”

You do, you take your shot like your life is depending on it. And maybe it’s the rigidity with which you held it at his guiding, or the unwavering gaze at the spot on the tree, or something else, something inherited from your father, despite that he is saying this is a woman’s skill, but despite it being your first try, it isn’t on the mark but it is very, very close, and the lighter, inner wood of the tree is exposed.

His hands are gripping your shoulders now, and you have lowered the rifle. The wind is blowing your unkempt braids about your shoulders; one of them had been stuck inside your jacket earlier. “Very good,” he tells you, almost mournfully. “I cannot tell you that I wish you will never have to do it. You are _my_ daughter, not the daughter of a baker or mathematics instructor. You have the life I am providing for you and, my Bohuslava, we keep with us what we are given in this world, no matter what else we manage to take for ourselves. You will live hard if I die tomorrow or in fifty years. So I must teach you how to live hard. I must show you what the men do, and how to do it better.”

Sometimes you want to ask him what he was given that he keeps with him. If he ever wants to get rid of it, if he ever tried. You wonder what made him, what led him to where he is now, what led him to where he was when you were born, where he was ten years before that. If he had been from Poland or Russia and not Ukraine, or if he was from Scotland or Australia or Alaska, what would have been different. What he would have done without the company, how he would have run around the world, if he would have at all. Sometimes, as an adult, you find yourself wondering if he was running from things long before he learned to kill. You wonder, in those years, if what he gave to you that you have kept isn’t the violence, the lawbreaking, the drinking- but the running, the running with no end in sight but death, the running that you take for yourself so you’ll have something that wasn’t given to you.

But now you are thirteen and you just nod your head because he can be very dramatic and sentimental sometimes, even sober, but it is better this way, and you do not have any reason to try and put him off it. You are not good at not provoking him. But if it is possible, you do not. “Of course, father. Thank you.”

He sniffs, inhaling the cold air, tilting his head back a little. “I will get the tripod. We will take a picture of this. Soon we will no longer be in Alaska,” he gives you a meaningful look. You wonder what he’s done, if he’s done anything, or if this is just another inevitability of the business. Make one deal and the damage is done before it happens and soon you’ll need new grounds, like a flock of vampires, exiled from village to village at the point of a stake with the rising sun at their backs, constantly searching for new veins.

But you stand in the picture with him, like two tourists, and for the moment, it’s the calmness of the silent understanding, for better or worse, between family. The slight cold is gentle against your hands.

_

_May 2 nd: The school wanted me to write a journal. I’ve written journals before and everything. The guidance counselor explained it to me and made it seem like some weird new age ritual. Sometimes I absolutely hate her, and everyone else in school. She’ll ask me if I’ve been keeping up with my journal in a way that sounds like she’s asking what I’m saying in it and I want to tell her, I’m writing about how much I fucking hate everyone at this school for all the shit they’ve done to me. I want to say, I hate you all just for how you’ve looked at me over the years, for all the things I’ve had to hear you all say, for the time those guys knocked out Andy and then touched me all over and tried to do more and I was too afraid to scream or say anything to them and I could only think about how you fucking people who work for the school would claim it was my fault, and most of all, I hate you for thinking you’re in any way qualified to tell me what is helpful and what my mother dying means. _

_I guess writing in this journal isn’t doing anything bad to me but I also really don’t see how this is helping me in any way. My mother is still dead and that’s the important part. I’ll write, I suppose, but I have no illusions that this is supposed to heal me or make me forget anything. Sometimes I want to tell Andy the stupid things the counselor tells me, but I don’t think either of us would find it very funny once I actually said it._

_They gave me this book to read, “Reviving Ophelia.” I realized quickly this was how the school administration was thinking of me, which I find completely fucking offensive. It’s the kind of thing I would laugh about if I made a sarcastic joke hypothetically about them doing this, but they actually did. They really outdid themselves this time, I guess. Sometimes I want to say things like that and show them maybe I really am as bad as some people think I am. Fuck you I want to say. You don’t think I belong here, well I know I don’t belong here, I should be dead with my mother, you and I both would find that arrangement much more agreeable, wouldn’t we? It would be a lot easier for everyone. CPS would have one less unwanted kid off their hands, no need to throw me at some creep with an open room._

_But maybe there’s no point in even, you know, doing it. I want to die sometimes but why even bother going through with it. Sometimes in the morning when it’s time for school I don’t get out of bed, because I don’t set my alarm and even when I’m awake I don’t get up, and one of the Barbours’ maids will be sent to Platt’s room to make sure I get to school, and I want to say, no I’m not oversleeping, I just want to stay in here forever, sorry for making you do even more work._

_Every day is the longest I’ve ever gone without her. I realized that. It used to be, one day ago I was with her, two days ago I was with her. Now it’s so long and it will only be longer from here on for the rest of my life._

_Soon it will be a month. What will I even do with another? I just want it all to be over._

_

When you’re in Alaska you walk for miles on your own and hitchhike, thankful it isn’t as cold as it could be, that it’s not December, that you’re not in Ukraine. When your father is drunk it’s still like having a storm in your house, but when he’s gone, he’s gone for weeks, and you don’t always know what to do when you’re all alone like that, which got you to having to walk and hitchhike to get places, usually to steal things. If you had real money you could just buy it, but then, if you had real money you’d still have to walk for hours in the cold just to get a candy bar or some headache pills.

The town you live in is small in population, but spread out very widely. You have no neighbors, and if you did, they’d probably hate you. This is probably, you’ve gathered as you’ve grown older, why your father tends to pick out houses that aren’t near anything.

One day after you’ve walked two hours to the Main Street of the town, to get to its convenience store, after you come out and stand at the side of the road with your thumb out, you see a man you’ve seen a few times, outside of his car, smoking. Once you froze as he caught you putting some Slim Jims and a water bottle in your jacket but he winked at you and put a finger over his lips, then smiled, so you’d understand. You suppose you are clearly looking at him because he stares at you a moment. “Did you want one?” he asks, gesturing to his cigarettes.

You nod your head. “Yes, sure,” you say. He gives it to you and you inhale and exhale, the smoke from the cigarette coming out like ice breath in winter.

“I’ve seen you a few times here. You and your family are new, aren’t you,” he says, “my name is Ed. You?”

“Slava,” you say, not offering a last name. You don’t usually bother. You move aside because next to you someone is walking by with a lot of bags and you’re in the way. “How do you know my family?” you ask suspiciously. He could be lying. The way he said family could mean he thinks it’s more than just you and your father.

“Kid,” he says, “everyone in the area knows about your father’s company. Everyone here knows someone who works for him or who’s met him.”

“Okay,” you say.

“Do you need a ride?” he asks you. “I don’t live so far away from here. But then, your father probably tells you hitchhiking is dangerous. You don’t need to worry, but I understand if you say no.”

“I hitchhike many times,” you tell him, and he smiles. “But I live far away on edge of town. That okay with you?”

He shrugs. “If your father is going to be at work why don’t you just have dinner at my house?”

You look down. “Do not tell shopkeeper I stole,” you say, because you’re sure he knows, you’re sure now he thinks you’re bad, your bastard father’s feral little animal bitch daughter, like you heard someone say once.

“No, of course,” Ed says. “You’re hungry, it’s almost dinnertime, I have leftovers that will go to waste if I don’t eat all of them.” You shrug and stub out your cigarette with your boot but then pick its remains up and throw it out because of the environment, not that anyone in America probably cares about any of that.

In the car, Ed says, “your father isn’t home today, is he?” You shake your head.

“Busy working,” you say, “I am used to it.”

He shakes his head. “It’s easy to get used to hard things,” he says, and you find yourself nodding in agreement. He puts a hand on your shoulder. “It’s okay,” he says, “it will be fine.” You don’t say anything. You try to think of something to say but immediately forget the English for it.

“We’re almost at my house,” he says, his fingers warm against the space where your shoulder touches your throat. They’re still there, feeling like a sunburn, when he pulls in to his house, and there are no lights on in it, and he only takes his fingers off to open the car door. You try to open yours, but you find it was locked, and he walks over to open it for you. The windows are so dark they look like endless holes, the way ponds look in the middle of the night.

“It can be hard to have to be alone when you’re at your age. It can be scary,” he says, putting something into his oven, and walking over to sit at the small table and wait for you. Your fingernails are digging into your palms. You can smell the food heating up. The window is open, even though it’s and evening, and not hot enough at all to need an open window.

You’re never really scared to be alone, you think. Just very sad. But maybe this is something adults can’t understand. Or maybe it’s just something people who aren’t you don’t go through. When you’re afraid, it’s generally when you’re around other people, like now, but there’s nothing that can be done about being afraid. Maybe that’s why it’s such a horrible thing to feel. You concentrate on the smell of the food, the loud ticking of the round clock on the wall. The warmth of your jacket, which you’ve zipped up all the way. You wonder how far you could run before you wouldn’t be able to any more. You wonder who this man is and what he’s heard about your father and what he’s heard about you if he knew who you were. Canada wasn’t like this, for all you complained to yourself. Neither was Australia, and neither was Papua New Guinea. 

Ed smiles at you. “Sometimes I feel quiet too,” he says. “Maybe we’re a lot alike in that way. Your father won’t be home for some days now, won’t he?” The cloth of the table mat underneath your hands, the threads thick and you can feel them, the individual pieces woven together. 

You look at him, almost questioningly, but you don’t answer. “Thank you for making dinner,” you say uneasily, “very generous of you.”

“Don’t worry, Slava,” he says to you, “don’t be afraid.”

You never tell him exactly where your house is. You never tell him your last name. You never tell him much of anything once you’re in his house. In the days after, you try not to think about his house, not his kitchen with linoleum floors cold from the outside air let in through the open window, the rooms all dark and just barely you can see some stuff like in a haunted house movie, his room where the walls are painted this weird light yellow color and he says it was supposed to be calming like the sun but it isn’t, you’ve never liked the sun much, but you know it isn’t calming, nothing is what he’s telling you. His house isn’t light or dark. It is more like faded, and dim, a place with no day or night. And you try not to think about him, not anything about him at all even though you do, the feel of his heated fingers and his voice like an echo, and you can’t always control what you think about, but when you can, it’s only the moment you went to the open window in the middle of the night and pushed it all the way open and climbed on the countertop and ran out and ran and ran and then walked and then collapsed at the side of the road for a few minutes and then kept going and made it home, the grass cold and wet with dew. You never go back to the Main Street again, and you are grateful that you know your time in Alaska is coming to an end.

Your father is back three days later looking like if you cut him he would bleed vodka, and when he sobers up and apologizes to you for doing what he always does, and you bandage your arm even though one of your eyes got swollen, he breaks down and tells you he’d been so alone without you, and really, the two of you only have each other in the world. Together in that empty house in Alaska, like all your other houses before, so large that everything is out in the open, you don’t have enough to hide, not really hide, and you never bring enough with you anyway. It is a mess but the kind of mess that happens when people barely live in it and when they do they just go out of control. Not the kind of place where everything is put together for some kind of plan, not the kind of place where people are supposed to be stuck in. Just a building. Just a place. It shelters you, nothing more and nothing less, that’s the deal, and you respect that. It’s an honest one, and as a businessman’s daughter, you value an honest deal. 

“We need each other in this world,” he tells you, his eyes streaming, “In this country. We’re both all alone. I don’t know what I would do without you. I am sorry for what I have given you. We had no choice. But one day you will grow up and we will really work together, my Bohuslava, my daughter, and we’ll look out for one another, and we won’t need anyone, and no one could reach us…”

For the first time, holding him in your arms, standing still while he was on his knees, trying not to cry, you feel like, at least for the moment, you are really consoling him the way he always wants, and that you really understand him when he says, to be one of us is to never be able to stop. 

_

_7/7_

_Dear Mom,_

_Things are weird. I don’t know how else to describe it really. I live with Dad and his girlfriend Xandra out in the middle of nowhere. No, really. He came out to New York and found me and I don’t live with the Barbours anymore which made me kind of sad and not just because of Dad even if he says he’s trying to be better now._

_Seriously, there are no people on this street. Supposedly we’re in Las Vegas but I haven’t seen the city since I was at the airport. And school hasn’t started so I pretty much never see anyone except Dad and Xandra, when they’re here. It’s like being in a suspended state. Nothing ever happens here really._

_They celebrated their anniversary at a Bon Jovi concert…I’m not kidding. Dad is doing all kinds of things in town all the time, and Xandra manages a bar on the Strip, so I’m home alone a lot. Don’t worry, I’m safe, it just feels weird being in a place that’s so isolated with so few people. I’m sure when you were young and you traveled all over the country you must have seen places like this. If you were here you would know what to say or do._

_My birthday is coming soon and I don’t want to get older. I don’t want to become some other person changed by time, someone you wouldn’t know, become something I don’t even want to be._

_Oh, and there’s a little dog here named Popper. He’s very cute and he likes me but I think that could be because everyone else kind of ignores him. So he stays by me while I watch TV or sleep and things like that. I remember you said you had a dog named Poppy when you were a kid._

_I miss you._

_

Las Vegas is dull, and not even in an enjoyable way. This summer, you thought time would never end. So far, you’re not sure why everyone thinks America is so fun. Alaska, Texas, and now this, supposedly the most exciting city in the country. You’re not even sure why you’re here, but if it is just going to get worse, you don’t want to know what city is next. Right now, you’re mostly alone, because there’s virtually no one on your street; even less people than in Alaska and Canada. But there are worse things than being completely alone, you suppose. Although maybe you’re not the only person who is alone, you’ve noticed, now that school has begun.

The girl in your class looks more sad and more beautiful than anyone you’ve ever seen. You vaguely remember a storybook you were given as a child. Maybe it was from school, maybe it was from your mother, all you know is, you would sometimes spend your time reading because you had no friends and you read this fairy tale, The Princess Who Never Smiled, The Unsmiling Tsarevna, to be more literal, and that describes this girl. You have never once seen her smile, no matter if someone tells a joke or makes a laughably stupid comment, no matter if the pretty, sad English teacher (who kind of reminds you of her, come to think of it) gives her a good grade (you sit behind her and can see the letter in red at the top of the page). She looks down, or out into the distance. She is always sitting still and moves as if she is tired or sick. She only sometimes speaks, in a soft, quiet voice, enunciating like someone in an old movie. She wears wrinkled, oversize sweaters and long wool skirts and ribbons pulling back her long, tousled hair and round glasses that look like the kind of thing a much older person would use. She has soft rosy brown skin and large, thoughtful eyes. She seems to be wearing makeup, nothing too flashy- black eyeliner, pale pink on her lips. Whenever the attendance is called you hear her name is Theodora and she always looks down when her name is called like she doesn’t want anyone to know she exists. You once heard one of the boys saying something about _I wonder what Double Decker got up to in New York_ so you shot him a look and told him to close his fucking mouth and his friend laughed and said _fuck dude, don’t make Samara mad_ but that boy never tried to make any comments about her again where you could hear. You usually don’t give a fuck what people say about you, though.

You’d love to talk to her but sometimes you think maybe she wouldn’t like to talk to you. She doesn’t seem like she talks to other people at all, but she looks observant enough to hear what people say. Maybe she heard the other day when you misunderstood and thought New Mexico was in Mexico and someone said _mail order bride probably doesn’t even know the alphabet_ and you were so mad but didn’t say anything because it wasn’t worth it, or when some girls saw you passing by and said _gross you can see she doesn’t wear anything underneath her clothes how much of a slut do you have to be_ or something like that and you almost considered shoplifting something to wear underneath after that, but she seems above these dumb kids. A certain elegance, like she wouldn’t take stock in stupid gossip even if she might not like you. But a lot of people don’t like you and it’s worth a chance- people don’t seem to like her either. So you decide, soon enough, you will talk to her.

“Twat,” you snap when one of your idiot classmates says some foolish comment, and you look right at _Theodora Decker_ like you want to say _are we the only normal people here?_ Well, the teacher you don’t mind. But the students, on the other hand, you do.

At first she looks a bit surprised, scandalized, looks around to see if others are looking at her or maybe checking to see if you weren’t looking to someone else. You hope she didn’t think you were calling her a twat. But she smiles a little, like she’s trying not to but still wants you to see that she is.

You decide you’ll try and talk to her later.

_

“Princess. Tsarevna Nesmeyana,” you say to Theodora when you find her waiting for the bus alone (no friends? Maybe she is like you), squinting a little in the sun and wishing you’d brought your umbrella. At least your loose t-shirt and cutoffs aren’t smothering you the way you once got dehydrated in Australia when you were a kid and wore this wool sweater without thinking. If people are going to make comments about your clothes then fine. Let them all look the same.

She looks at you, confused and seemingly expecting some kind of clarification. Well, if she isn’t offended, then it means she wants you to talk to her. “What,” she says, sounding a bit distracted, yet paying attention to you.

“The Princess Who Never Smiled,” you raise your hands up like you are beginning the story. “Classic Russian fairy tale, did you never hear? Beautiful beautiful girl like yourself never smiled, always sad.” She smiles, a little uncomfortable, like she doesn’t believe what you’re saying about her, but she’ll humor you anyway.

You look at her and think, she looks like she might have appreciated Alaska. Were things different, you probably would have liked it much more than you did. As things are, a lot about all the places you’ve been makes a good story anyway, one she seems like she’d enjoy. You don’t want to scare her off, but you have a feeling, she wants someone to talk to, to be around, who isn’t like everyone else here. She’s alone, and you’ve been alone.

She shrugs. “Yeah, sure,” she says, “no reasons to smile around here. My name is actually Theodora. Theo. Whatever.” Her words are nonchalant, unfazed, but the way they come out is more depressive.

“All Americans do is smile for no reason even if they are about to do something bad. Except you,” you tell her. “Slava is my name.” Theo and Slava, both girls with names that could also be boy’s nicknames. You think Bohuslava sounds like the name of one of those old women who look and seem like they could be hundreds of years old. “Bohuslava Pavlikovskaya. Please do not call me that though. Just say Slava.”

“All right, Slava. Never Summer,” she recites, drily, looking at your shirt. “It feels like it’s always summer here. But in the most awful way.” She certainly never dresses for summer, but that, you suppose, is her business.

You find that you’re straining your eyes as the next bus comes, and moving forward when you see the number. You’ve seen her on the bus before but hadn’t sat with her. Now, certainly, you will. You walk forward together and ask what they always seem to ask new students here. “How long have you been here?”

_

You tell Theodora your stories and she stares at you, rapt, a little incredulous and surprised at some things, interrupting sometimes. _No way_ she says in that American too-cool-to-believe-you way _. But isn’t that dangerous?_ All concerned in her soft fairytale princess voice when she isn’t too cool to show how worried she is, something that will be commonplace. _Wow_ she says when she doesn’t know what else to say. You tell her all about how you converted to Islam in Indonesia and how happy you were, but you weren’t practicing anymore, and you don’t say this but you suppose you were never good at religion. You tell her about how when you were in Texas and your father left you alone for weeks you stood out by the corner to hitchhike and were picked up by a motorcyclist and you wrapped your arms around him and you asked if you could drive and he told you, _babe if you’ve never done it before you’d kill me and yourself,_ so you held on anyway, and you shared a beer with him and he kissed you, and said you were wild and one day you’d make the road your own, and she looked so nervous when she heard, but she didn’t want you to stop talking about it, and you didn’t say some things about Alaska you’d preferred to not talk about. You tell her about how you lived near a reservation in Canada and she tells you her grandfather lived on one in this country for a lot of his life but she never got to meet him and she told you about his life, before and after her mother, that her mother told her, and she tells you about her mother.

In return she tells you about her life, too, whether or not you ask, even though sometimes she can be very secretive, very mysterious, but in a way where you can tell she is just sad, hiding from the truth. Whether or not she is sober, but depending on what state, you sometimes are told different things.

She’s a virgin, which you kind of guessed but wanted to ask anyway, and instead of being shy as you thought she might, she answered you so openly, like she was volunteering a deeper secret. She’s never been out of the country but she reads a lot so she knows some things a lot of Americans don’t, like how Ukraine is now its own country and not called The Ukraine. She tells you that her dad used to drink a lot and one day, when she’s not sober, she tells you that when she was younger he was completely hammered and looked right at her and said _your mom can try and make you her little doll all she wants, and maybe you look like her, but you’re just like me_ , and he said it like he was trying to be affectionate, and telling you this she laughed wildly and said she sometimes wonders if she was born to be like him, and you thought maybe the two of you were more similar than you’d ever been able to think of before you even spoke to her. She shares her headphones with you and tells her all about her music, some of which is her mother’s and you sing her songs that you learned in your school in Poland, songs you remember from your mother a lifetime ago which was really maybe five years ago, you play heavy metal songs you like on your CD player and she says in that American way _wow._

“Sometimes you just want to _scream_ , yah?” you tell her as Arkona’s Lepta begins with “Sotkany Veka.” You haven’t had that much to drink, neither of you.

She is mostly sober but looks you back in the eye, that intense gleam in there that you sometimes see when she is about to have a blackout night, trapped in her wide, pure eyes. “Yeah,” she says. “Fuck. Every day.” She gives you a sly smile. “I might actually go to school dances if they played this. But then someone would have to ask us and all the boys here are stupid.” Again, you wonder if she knows the things people say about you, or even her.

“Ah, we can go without them, Princess. But then the school dances here are boring I am sure,” you say. “No one here is fun.” You say that because it’s easier for now to say, later the two of you will say things like- no one here is like us, no one here gets it. Her eyes are closed.

“It’s like something from another world. Not like she’s angry or anything. She just has this force inside her,” Theo says, her eyes closed. “Like I don’t know. A storm.” She gives a shuddering exhale. 

Over the days- and you spend most of every day together, so it’s like you have known each other a long time in no time- she tells you more.

Her mother died in a terrorist attack in a museum back in New York you think you heard about on the news or maybe some of the kids in school were talking about it. She thinks it was her fault and you always tell her no, of course it was not. She’s never been away from New York for much longer than a week, until now, but her mother lived all over the middle of the country, was originally from Kansas. She wishes her mother’s parents were still alive sometimes so she could have gone to live with them- when she is less guarded, she tells you this, she says they would have wanted her and sometimes she thinks even her friend’s family didn’t actually want her, and no one wants her. This is not true because you want her around, but you don’t tell her that, and you suppose it’s not the same as having an actual family who wants her. You wonder if she thinks that she’s like you now. Traveling and looking for people who will take kindly to her, or at least who won’t give her trouble. And there was a man in New York, a nice man with a shop of old things. A boy he adopted- you think, you are a bit unsure of the situation- was in the museum with his great-uncle and the great-uncle you think was _with_ the man in that way that some men are like, and Theo visits him a lot, and maybe you think he would have been better for her to stay with him than with the wealthy family. And sometimes this man Mr. Hobie sends letters on fancy paper. And sometimes she starts to write letters to this boy Philip but never sends them.

“Is _he_ your boyfriend?” you ask. You’ve never had a real boyfriend but have done other things. Maybe that’s why the kids at school call you slut and skank and things like that, maybe they think it’s less bad if you’re doing it with just one guy, or maybe it’s just that it’s you. You vaguely remember some woman screaming at her kids for playing with the soccer ball with you back in Texas, get away from that dirty little street girl, then to you, don’t come back here, your father does the devil’s work. 

“What the fuck, Slava?” she responds. “Why do you ask me that about _every_ guy I talk to? I could never get one, I’ve told you that.” Maybe, you think, it’s just because she’s too shy, of course she could get one. “He…he’s from back home.” You can tell she misses New York, as much, maybe more than this boy. If she knew him so well she would be on the phone with him all the time, probably. But you think she’d be sad if she had to go back there. Because it would have gone on without her, and maybe she wouldn’t recognize it as the exact place she remembered. You think about that a lot every time you miss a place you’ve left. It is good to keep your distance, sometimes. The memory will always be with you. That is worth something.

“Is he mad? You are apologizing,” you read over her shoulder. “Sometimes if the guy hits you when you argue is easier to just apologize even if he is wrong to be mad.” The times you’ve been with guys they don’t usually do that, but you’ve seen it happen a lot. And then your father. Sometimes you don’t even have to apologize for anything, he does. Is this good? No, but it is the way it is.

“No, he isn’t the type who would…” Theo immediately says, staring at you for a long time, like she’s trying to figure out what to say. “And that isn’t _right_. Even if someone is mad it’s not okay. Wait, Slava, do you have a boyfriend who does that to you? Because-” she looks very distraught now, no longer annoyed with you, so you smile. You do not want to worry her innocent, pretty head with the things you have seen too many times to count.

“Eh, okay,” you want to change the subject, “Don’t worry, sweet Princess. No boyfriend. Of course not! I am spending all day with you every day. No time for one!” She smiles a little, like she just caught on to a joke. “But you write all the time to Philip?” you ask. You’ve noticed she writes a lot of letters, not just writing in her notebooks. Sometimes when you are drinking and fall asleep you wake up and she is still writing in one of those notebooks.

She shrugs. “I don’t send all of them, really. Besides, he’s sick. And who knows if his aunt would even give them to him,” she says bitterly, and you remember her telling you about this aunt who seemed to hate her and the older man.

“Hm,” you say, confused with this situation. You should ask more about it later. It seems very complex, and only partially explained right now, but you already can tell she will talk when she’s ready, if you don’t ask. Even so, sometimes when she talks even if it’s for ten minutes straight she seems like she’s holding back, or presenting a different version of events. Maybe sometimes it’s easier that way. That explains why all her unsent letters to this boy say different reports, why her letter to Hobie says she’s having a great time, when she can’t possibly be. “Will you teach me to do eyeliner?” Theo has her own little bag of cosmetics brought from New York that she tells you she wore all the time. Her mother was once a fashion model and she always told Theo _if you’re going to do that, I’ll show you which ones are good for your skin_. Theo had been a little young but her mother wasn’t the type to get angry with her for doing it, nor did she force it on her. You want to have the kind of heavy metal look with black and gray linings around the eyes, even if you do have such big undereye circles. Well, both of you do, but Theo attempts to cover them.

“Yeah, sure,” she says. “After that do you want to go to the vending machine by the community center?”

“Yes!” you tell her. At first it surprised you that she would want to go to an abandoned place like that community center, you thought she’d be afraid, but then, she was from New York City, and you’re finding as fearful as she is, she’s restless. “Should we bring Snaps along too?” You love the little white dog, the sight of him always makes you happy.

You’re having a good time. If you had someone to write to, you’d say that. You could tell her that, but right now, you don’t. If she is sad, you will let her be sad and have fun. Sometimes, Judy once told you, you have to take it slow. Be patient, and good things will happen if you work for them.

_

_9/28:_

_Dear Mom,_

_So my first year of high school has begun. A few weeks ago- I’ve been kind of busy. And I’m fourteen as of a couple months ago. Time keeps going forward. I’m LaTour’s Magdalene with the Smoking Flame, holding the skull in her lap._

_I hate the school and everything here and all but honestly now that I’ve thought about it I probably wouldn’t have gotten much enjoyment out of starting ninth grade in my old school in New York, either, and you probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that. We both knew I was always happiest weekends and vacations._

_I was mostly alone for the first couple weeks, I don’t really fit in here. Maybe I don’t fit in anywhere. I want to send Hobie and Philip letters but maybe it would make me too sad to think maybe we’ll never get to really be together. What would I say? I don’t know. You can not know what to say when you’re with someone, but not when you’re far away. You can’t just send someone a letter that says “I’m too sad to know what to tell you.” At least I’m not in a foster home, I guess. On the bright side I don’t have to see a guidance counselor even though I think some of the teachers and other kids know what happened. It was on the news for a while and everything, and the journalists kept trying to reach me. Although, they can’t here. They don’t know where I am anymore._

_But I did make a friend recently! This is the first time I’ve made a friend who’s a girl before. Is it weird that I’m excited about this? I wish you could meet her because she’s really cool and funny, and is very nice to me and we have a lot of fun together, and she’s been all around the world and has so many stories so the two of you might have a lot to talk about. She’s never been to New York though, so that’s something I can teach her about. Her name is Bohuslava but everyone just calls her Slava – apparently that can be both a girl’s and boy’s nickname, kind of like “Theo”. We hang out every day and school is still awful but we get through it together, basically. She’s Ukrainian and also Polish and lived in those places and also Russia, but also has lived in Australia and Indonesia and Alaska and Texas because her dad works in mining and is always traveling. They just got here. I hope they don’t leave soon. If that doesn’t sound weird?_

_So I’ve been busy lately, and sometimes I’m too busy to write much in the journals (I am trying to study, don’t worry), but I feel kind of happy. I feel like I can talk to her about things, about you and Dad, and the attack and Hobie and Welty and Philip, and the Barbour house, and all the things that happened and everything I was afraid of and still am. She listens and I feel like I’m not used to people doing that, not really. Not anymore, not since you._

_I remember once Dad told me when I was a kid: "you know, we've had our bad days, but your mother doesn't let anyone tell her what to do. You have to give her that." Maybe I'll never be anything like you._

_I wish I could tell you everything about here, I wish you could have told me everything about everywhere you had been._

_

“Wow,” Theo says one day to you, laughing as you sneak back inside in the middle of the night, both relieved that her dad and Xandra are not in fact at home as you thought they might be, “you’re not afraid of _anything_ ”. It isn’t just that she thinks you’re cool, it’s that she thinks you’re good. And sometimes when you’re with her you think you might actually be. But you wish she knew she was good, too. You’re both many people’s definition of bad, sure, but she is good.

She isn’t like you in every way. You sometimes feel so afraid it possesses you like some kind of frenzy, and you can’t talk or do anything but run or drink or do something crazy just to make it go away, just to replace the fear with something real. You sometimes feel so angry, at nothing at all, physical rage without anything to do with it, and you wish you could have understood what Bami was trying to teach you when he told you to pray, you sometimes wish you weren’t too angry for faith. You cannot actually see yourself at the age of Mr. Decker or Xandra, or of your young and pretty English teacher Spirsetskaya, or even of the college students you see on the bus or at the mall, no matter how hard you try. You sometimes think you’re not good enough for her, but then, she’d hate to hear you say that, and you can imagine her saying, “come on Slava, there’s no way you can really think that,” or you can see her eyes widening the way they do when she hears something upsetting, “what are you saying?”

You shrug. “Eh,” you say, “they are really not so bad. I cannot see them being very angry if we stay out at night, and this is something parents can get very, very angry at their daughters for doing even in _land of free America?”_ you ask.

She ponders that a moment. “But they’re- we’re…oh,” she says. “Yeah. I mean, they suck but it’s like they don’t notice anything we do. Xandra is like an RA at a college or something. Like ‘you can smoke cigarettes but not mine.’ And if my dad was one of those _don’t date my daughter or I’ll shoot you with my rifle_ guys I’d walk in front of a truck,” she rolls her eyes, which startles you so much for a moment you’re speechless, but she says it so offhandedly, the way you say, _ah, Princess, this air conditioning is cold as Ukraine in January, I want to be put out of my misery!_ “Promise you’re not going to laugh at me,” she says warningly. “At home I kind of had a _reputation_ a little. Like I was this _bad_ girl who had no friends who were girls and hung out with the rebel boy. And all the teachers were like, oh, Theo, we know you’ve been struggling since your father left. What a fucking cliché.” You raise your eyebrows. “Don’t fucking laugh,” she says, sounding like she’s about to, “your _face_ ….”

You can see where she’s coming from. You’re glad your father has no idea what you do or what people say you do, either. If you ever tell him about Theo you decide you will have to provide a false last name. It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s just that his values and expectations are probably completely unique to your situation. It is what it is. You would not have it another way. You would not have him different, because then, who would he be? You have no idea. You would not choose someone you did not know. And you would not have him know more about you. He must be aware he does not know every single thing you do, and this is something you can respect in him: that he understands he cannot own you entirely. If you told anyone, you are aware now, and you will be aware as an adult, that this will not be their evaluation of his mind. But you knew him better than they ever could.

“I thought we _are_ bad girls now, no?” you say. She shrugs. “Like the song. Down on the strip, like Las Vegas! Out on street at night! Bad girls sad girls!” you are now yelling and chasing her around the large rooms, you are chasing each other, laughing wildly.

“Sad?” Theo doesn’t yell it so much as says at the top of her voice, swinging around the couch in the living room. You can hear Popchyk yelling from the other room, you have both probably woken him up, maybe he will want to be walked and you will just end up going back out again.

You give her a wry smile. “Yah,” you tell her, starting to lie down on the rug, staring at the ceiling. “Very Russian, you know? Even in good times, there is sadness.”

She nods, her head moving quickly, gently. “Yeah,” she says wearily. “Maybe that’s not just Russia.” Popchyk’s little footsteps sound closer and closer. “We should take him out,” she says as if she’s realized she’s forgotten something. You start to get up.

“Anything for our little man,” you extend your hand out.

“Do you ever think about the fact that aside from the dog pretty much nobody has any idea what’s going on with us because all we do is hang out together, alone,” she says. You wonder if she’s about to drop some confessional on you the way she sometimes does when she isn’t sober like she is now, tell you yet another secret, with or without context, you’ll think about in class during a test, wide awake in bed, distracted while watching TV. _It’s my fault my mother died because we were going to my school because I was in trouble and she’d be alive if not for me. Once Tom asked me if I wanted to steal some liquor from his neighbor and I said no and he said it was cool if I didn’t want to drink because it’s not like he’s one of those guys who pressures girls into doing stuff but I didn’t feel pressured by him, I just wanted to stave off the inevitable, buy some time, sometimes I’m mad at him not because of what he did but because he made me realize that maybe I am bad inside and always was going to be._ _I think people used to feel sorry for me but they didn’t like me or want me around and sometimes I think Andy’s family felt that way because they thought I stole and I never gave them any reason to think that I’d steal from them but I’m a thief Slava, I really am, not candy from the store, a real thief._ She laughs then, though. “It’s like we have our own planet out here. It even looks like outer space.”

“Is not outer space,” you say, “just somewhere new.”

“I don’t know,” she says, “I feel like I’m starting to get used to it in a way. _Home on the range_ ,” said more sarcastically. “It doesn’t feel that new anymore, some of it.” Theodora looks at you, lingering gaze, in the way she sometimes does when you wonder if she’s expecting you to say something. “I’m sure it takes no time for you to get used to things,” she says.

Not always. “You are helping me get used to it,” you say. You can see her smile a little, but trying not to. You wish she wouldn’t do things like this, but if you told her, you think she would not want to talk about it. If she wants to be shy and reserved, that is fine. But it is sometimes like she does not want to be anything at all. “How would I make sense of crazy America without you, Princess? This is not little town in Alaska or Texas. I am in the big city now,” you put out both hands like you are overwhelmed.

“But we’ve never been to the city,” she says after a pause.

“Oh? Our addresses say _Las Vegas_. Then where are we if not there?” you say. She looks like she’s staring off into nowhere, into her own world that not even you can see into.

“Somewhere no one can find us,” she says, almost vacantly, and then right after that, her eyes go back and forth like she’s checking to see if anyone is looking at her. “We should walk him,” she says, quieter, “okay?”

The two of you, with Popchyk, go back out into the night, alone and together, no one by your sides and no one stopping you, and it is 2005 in the planet of Earth in the country of America in the city of Las Vegas and sometimes on the same exact day you think you have never been this happy and this unhappy, this at peace and this frustrated, and you think if anyone tried no one _could_ stop either of you, not together, not here, not now. 

_

The two of you took the bus to the mall, completely sober in the middle of the day on a Saturday. Theo seems a little nervous once you go through the doors and end up in some department store, surrounded by bed displays. “What is wrong?” you ask, wondering if she is sick.

She looks at the floor and is quiet for a moment. “It’s just sometimes…crowds…” she seems like she doesn’t want to have to say it. You put an arm around her shoulder. “I wish I didn’t. But I guess it will always be like this. I feel so stupid.” 

“Hey,” you say, “if you want to leave. We can just watch television at home.” She looks at you right in the face, her eyes wide and fearful but in her face you see she trusts you. You’re not sure if anyone has ever looked at you like that before. In a moment she seems to be a bit dazed for a second, then looks away and steps back.

“I dare you to try that on,” she says, gesturing towards what appears to be a black velour tube top with a logo in gold on it.

“Is warm fabric but only covers little part of body? I do not understand you Americans,” you say, walking toward it anyway. You see a blue dress that appears to be misshapen, its hem long and then short and then longer again. “You do this one,” you tell her.

In the dressing room you find you actually kind of like it on her. The shirt on you is a bit ill-fitting and the tag scratches you. “You know famous people wear stuff like this,” she tells you. The two of you keep going trying on things in dark velour with rhinestones and bright terry cloth and t-shirts with odd sayings on them.

“We look like Xandra,” you say, and Theo laughs a crazy little laugh. (The other day you called Xandra _your stepmother_ to Theo who looked repulsed and said she wasn’t, that she never married her dad. So you said, “smart. No woman should ever get married,” and Theo looked at you for a minute like she was trying to figure something out, then said, “not that I'd call Xandra smart, but given how much better off my mom was without my dad, maybe you might be on to something.”)

“No, _you_ do in that tracksuit.” You actually don’t mind it that much. You wish you had something that warm for the inside of Theo’s house, air conditioned so much your skin gets bumpy. “I don’t even know _what_ this is,” she says about her cropped, wide pants she tried on after the dress. “It’s like the girl from No Doubt or something. Wow, we look twenty-five.” But she is fourteen and you are fifteen, and you are still at the age when twenty-five is a thousand years away, and you wish she wanted to live to that age at night, too. But it’s day, and a thousand years haven’t passed yet. It’s like what you read in Spirsetskaya’s class: _the best of times, the worst of times_ , you’ll think that when you really are that age. 

“Is everything all right in there?” sternly asks the dressing room attendant.

“We’re probably not supposed to be in it together,” Theo whispers, looking a little nervous, but almost immediately giggling uncontrollably when you raise your eyebrows and stand on the stool inside so your feet can’t be seen.

When you’re out- having taken a brochure of the map of the mall from a stand- you end up in the food court. “So what do you think about Vegas so far?” Theodora asks, staring off at some storefront window. “You’ve been like everywhere. How does it rank?” she sounds unenthusiastic, like she can’t even get excited enough to rant about how terrible it is, eyerolling and laughing at your descriptions, _Slava what does that Polish word mean is it a swear? You really think it’s “a grave of a city?”_

“I always heard everyone say about Vegas that you shouldn’t spend more than a few days there,” she says, almost tonelessly. You throw your arm around her. It is a bright day and you are together eating cinnamon rolls and drinking ginger ale, not hungry or cold or stranded in the heat, safe. And the two of you have lifted cheap colorful hair ties from a sparkly accessory store, and eyeliners from a fancy makeup store, and used some money to buy this meal. 

“I have not yet seen the city,” you say. “So really does that even apply to us? I went through airport, and you did too, you went through Strip a few times. I did not. But did you ever stay in the city really? Get out of car, spend the day there?”

She thinks about it for a moment. “Well, no. Not really. What are you saying?”

You smile. “I know I never stay in one place for long but you will not be so easy rid of me!” She laughs a bit nervously and her eyes seem to dart around. “I suppose I mean to say we are both trapped here but does not have to feel that way.”

She blinks and looks at you, for a moment, her eyes very soft. She looks down. It’s not about this city or even the desert area you live in. You think she would still be sad in Paris or Tokyo or maybe even, maybe especially, New York. Yes, maybe this place is not so good. It is mercilessly hot and desperately isolated and you have to take a bus ride to some mall to see people and your school is full of idiots who hate you, but it is not all bad if there are good things, is this not true? The environment is always bad where you are and you are always mostly alone at best and there are always people who hate you. Is it not a good thing that she laughs when she is with you sometimes and you have someone who doesn’t hate you, even if you can see that she is so shy even around you it upsets her and you don’t know how to help?

Theodora says this quietly, staring ahead like she doesn’t want anyone to hear, maybe not even you. “I don’t feel trapped right now,” she says. Maybe you think she feels like she should. The moment passes and she smiles and looks right back to you. “I guess we can hate it here together,” she says, even though you’re not so sure if you’d say you _hate_ it here, not anymore. “And we can get the fuck out of here together someday.” She takes a drink of her soda and then looks a bit startled at what she said.

“Is very cute when you swear,” you tell her, amused. “Little pretty mouth, saying,” you do an exaggerated soft voice, putting a hand to your chest and widening your eyes like an ingenue in a silent film, “ _ohh fuck this…”_

She’s covering her mouth laughing, a very delicate gesture she does sometimes. Cute, but self-conscious in a way that always reminds you how restrained she so often (but not always) is, even when she should just be having fun. “Shut the fuck up, Slava,” she says, and then you’re laughing, and that Beverly Hills song is playing on the speakers and you ask why that would be playing in Las Vegas and she says _well I don’t fucking know_ and you say _but well I am right Princess_ and the both of you are still laughing and she says _actually yeah you are!_ And then the song ends and from then on whenever you hear it the two of you make fun of it, and that slow song by the group of many girls who have all those music videos starts _, I don’t want to go another day,_ and you don’t mind it but you pantomime being tired so she asks if you want to go to the candy store and take rock candy samples when no one is looking so you go and do that, and the two of you make sure to pick up after yourselves, the responsibilities remembered in sobriety.

_

The two of you are trying to tell yourselves you will soon go to sleep because both of you are worn out and you have school tomorrow and Theo doesn’t want to cut so much as you’ve been.

“We shouldn’t do it so much. I know you said you haven’t been to normal American schools but I don’t want you getting in trouble or anything.” You really don’t care that much but you don’t tell her that. “I did it a few times in New York,” she told you. “With my friend Tom…” a different friend from the smart rich boy, Andy, who emails sometimes. (When you asked her if he was her boyfriend she looked at you like you asked if you could get high off a flu shot. “Of course not. That’s what his weird younger brothers say and it drives us crazy, he thinks it’s so dumb. We’re just friends, Slava. I mean, we lived together like…it would be weird.” Like brother and sister, you think she was about to say, although you get the feeling she never once genuinely felt like part of the family, and that was why it would be weird, not so much the living together.) She did once tell you that you were the first girl she’d ever been friends with, and you told her the same went for you- Judy was an adult and that was different. Theo is actually your age, or close enough, a year younger.

“Is he your boyfriend?” you ask, teasing a little but genuinely interested. She’s mentioned him and you’re not entirely sure yet of what happened there. Maybe she has no girl friends because in New York all the boys liked her and the girls were too jealous; she is very pretty after all.

“Ugh,” she says, sounding like she has a migraine, shaking her head like the prospect is too horrible to consider. “I should never have let people assume he was. God. I would just skip school and run around with him so they assumed we were, you know, especially because he was a real rule breaker. We were just friends. Once when we were smoking I said I felt like the only girl in the school who’d do stuff like that, and he said, if I was then that was cool. And I never claimed I did what people were thinking, but I also didn’t say I didn’t, and we actually didn’t do anything like that. I never brought it up with Tom and I don’t think he minded what people thought. I’m still mad at him though. I’ve always been too shy to talk back to people even when I started breaking rules so I just let them.” Another thing you wouldn’t have guessed before you knew her: beautiful, gentle, shy, Theodora doesn’t do what everyone tells her. Her friend Tom seemed to like that in her, maybe liked it a little more than she thinks he did even if he didn’t really appreciate her, but of course you don’t know that. Maybe other people didn’t like it so much or else she wouldn’t have been so alone. But you like it. You wonder if she knows that’s good sometimes.

“Like when guys would hit Andy and call him freak and homo they’d call me… names too and I’d go with him to the nurse after to make sure he wasn’t injured but I wouldn’t fight back even this time after gym they hit his head against the ground and pinned me down and tried to…whatever.” She’s looking down now, her hands wrought. When you’re an adult you remember this and so many other things she’d said or stopped herself from saying, and wish you had told her it was all right to tell you, you wish at that age you’d have been able to listen the way she needed and you maybe were not always able to do. “I don’t mean to go on and on. Anyway, Tom is a fucking asshole. I told you, he got me in trouble and that was why my mom and I had to go to that meeting the day…” you hope you haven’t upset her and you tense for a moment, worrying she’ll start talking about how she wishes it was her again, even though this isn’t a blackout night. When it is, she never seems to remember the day after. Which maybe means she doesn’t really mean it, but she says those kinds of things so often you think it’s the opposite, she tells the truth at night and it buries itself inside of her all day.

(“Repression, is what some people say,” your father’s old lieutenant Evgeny once told you before he had a heart attack and died, because he was always like an uncle to you, and worked for your father but kept him away from you and your mother when it was a good idea for that separation to happen, “Bohuslava, secrets are all right sometimes. Only natural. But you should not ever try to keep a secret from yourself.”) 

“Well,” you tell her, placing your hand on her wrist. “If you want to go to school I will. I do not want you in trouble because of me.” The both of you are very quiet lying there for a moment, staring at the fabrics draped around your room. In the dim light it reflects colors onto the two of you. You don’t know her mother and you won’t claim to speak on her behalf even though you don’t believe she would have blamed Theo for what happened. So you just let her lie there, quietly, thinking about it, holding onto her.

Her eyes are half closed as she lies down on her side opposite you. You’re both a little drunk, but not to the point where you won’t remember things. “You are very beautiful,” you tell her.

“Shut up,” she giggles a little, looking away, hands on her mouth and face. She is so pretty when she gets a little pink in her face like this. 

“Come on. You do not believe me?” you ask.

“I’m not,” she responds, sounding a little unhappy and uncomfortable, brushing you off without a thought. You’ve told her this before and she never seems to believe it.

“Why do you always say this?” your voice is probably a little loud given that both of you are supposed to be going to sleep and you have to be up in about four hours. At least your father isn’t here.

Her eyes are closed now, and she must be very tired. “Because no one wants me so I must not be that pretty,” she says. You’re not entirely sure what she means but the more you think about it the more you can understand the idea. Most people don’t want you, if you’re honest, and no one calls you pretty (except for you suppose Judy but that was years ago), not even the guys who have taken interest in you.

“I want you,” you insist, “I am right here and you say no one wants you? I do not count?”

She bites her lip a little like she is about to laugh, or like she is upset, you can’t tell which. Her eyes open and she looks at you for a moment. In the dark of the room you can make out her expression- she looks lost here, like she’s about to say something. She pulls up the covers around her shoulders, wrapping herself up. “It’s cold,” she says. You roll closer and put your arm around her.

“Then we can go to sleep,” you say, wondering if she’ll pull away but she doesn’t. You can feel her breaths against her neck, soft and whispering. Even her breathing sounds sad. If she was going to cry she probably would have begun right now, unless she has a bad dream once she falls asleep, then she might when she wakes up. When that happens you hold her as close as you can and tell her she’s safe and you’re there, or you sing her the two kittens song, and if Popchyk is there you bring him close because maybe he will make her happy if you can’t. Maybe no one can make her happy but you just want to make her understand she’s safe.

“Please don’t go,” she says after a moment, her eyes closed again, half asleep. Maybe she was dreaming, not really talking to you. Maybe that’s what she’s hoping you’ll think. She never pushes you away or tells you you’re not helping or not wanted. Sometimes she doesn’t say anything, maybe she is sometimes too upset to talk or doesn’t know what to say, but you don’t mind quiet, even if sometimes you think she feels she must be quiet.

“No. I won’t leave you, Princess,” you reassure her, her soft hair tickling your shoulder as she silently nods, acknowledging what you said, taking your hand.

In the morning you wake up curled against each other like one of those calendar pictures of little animals in the offices at school. When Theodora notices her eyes widen. “Oh. Sorry,” she says, and looks away and rises quickly like she has an airplane to catch.

“Why are you sorry?” you wonder. “Princess, you just woke up. What do you think you have done already in two seconds?” She doesn’t answer. You think you have an idea of the reasoning behind her apologizing, and her silence. Maybe you don’t want to talk about it too much either. It goes unacknowledged that day, and every time it happens, and you never bring it up.

_

You are reading _The Idiot_ on the floor in the living room late one night while Theodora sleeps on the couch and the muted TV plays some music video countdown (earlier it was muted on some news station and no one was paying attention and Xandra said _I still can’t fucking believe this country elected him a second time_ and switched it to VH1), when her father comes in. You wonder at first if he is drunk but then you think he isn’t. Recently when Theo was sleeping you heard her dad and Xandra maybe not arguing so much as intensely having a discussion. _They’re not going to listen to me if I talk to them about this stuff, I’m a guy, you have to do it_ , he said, and she said, _maybe the little Russki will but Theo never listens to anything I say about anything, Larry, haven’t you noticed?_ You were almost a little proud then. Little shy Theodora who still has a mind of her own and doesn’t let anyone, not even you, tell her anything and does what she wants; every time you’re afraid for her and think she doesn’t know how to control herself and doesn’t care to protect herself, you think, at least no one else will ever control her. (But you were kind of wondering about what “this stuff” was that Mr. Decker was talking about, though you kind of had an idea.)

“ _Privjet_ kid,” he begins, “you mind if I sit here a minute?” you’re pretty sure this means he wants to have some kind of conversation, because he’s talking in the friendly-but-serious way the school teachers do when they’re about to lecture you about something but they don’t want you to think it’s a lecture, and you’re not sure where Xandra is. You prepare to just say _she is very tired_ – there are no empty glasses or beer bottles around, and the two of you didn’t have that much today anyway. You just nod. It wasn’t a real question anyway.

(“Where does he get his moneys?” you recently asked Theo; “Xandra’s bar did not pay for this big house?” she shrugged and told you she honestly never asks. You believe that. She seems like she doesn’t like talking to him much and he seems like he doesn’t know what to say to her. Maybe it’s hard for him. You think he is trying, or at least, trying much harder than your father. You have never once seen him hit Xandra or Theo, and you know Theo would have told you if he hit her mom.)

“Now,” he says, “Don’t worry, I don’t mind it or anything, but I’ve noticed you’ve been staying here a lot lately.” You have been. Recently Theodora let you stay in her room and you’ve been spending most nights here since, not to mention the days. Going to school or the mall or wherever together. She stirs a little in her sleep and you want to put a blanket over her because the air conditioner is too cold but that might wake her up.

“Thank you, Mr. Decker,” you tell him, “very nice home you have.”

“In fact,” he says, almost like he is continuing from what he said before, “I’d like to thank you. The thing with Theo is, she never really has a lot of friends. She’s struggled a lot, she was never really that confident or happy in New York. And I mean, part of that was maybe because she had some problems. Part of that was, you know, even in New York people aren’t always that accepting.” You think if she was awake she’d go quiet the way she sometimes is when she’s angry but can’t react. “You seem to be helping her a lot, through all the, you know.” You think he has had a few of those pills. But about what he says. You hope you are helping, but sometimes you think it will never be enough, and she will never be happy. Does she know what she does, when she wakes up? Does she feel like she deserves to not want to die? You are not sure.

“You know,” he tells you, lowering his voice, “she always lets people push her around. That’s not a way I think she should be living. Bad preparation for the rest of her life. Slava, you seem very…” he searches for the right word. “Well adjusted. On a good path. I know you probably have a lot you’re dealing with. Being a kid your age is no picnic, I’m not too old to remember. When I was your age I stayed out all night sometimes. My dad was a real bastard. Always got so mad. But he was always mad no matter what I did. So I stayed out anyway. That’s why I say, fine if you girls want to have fun. I’m not one of these extremists like how you see on the news these days, my daughter must stay inside all the time and wear a little purity ring and everything’s a sin. I mean, that’s just crazy. And after what happened, frankly, she needs to get out as much as she can. Learn how to live.” You think maybe he’s a little high. But you suppose he’s right. And you think he can tell there’s a reason besides Theo you spend more time here than at your own house, a reason that comes from your house. 

He goes on before you can talk. These pills are making him go “into overdrive”- a phrase you learned from a boy in science class when you had to do a class project on the school computers together. “But hey, Theo’s happier than she’s ever been. I think she might be able to have some kind of normal life now that she’s away from all that. I’m glad there’s been no trouble with you girls-”- you’re glad Theo isn’t awake because you’d both laugh, you’re not even sure what he means by that- “and you’re having fun, aren’t you? I said,” he seems to be referencing some other conversation but still talking to you, “it’s safe here for you. Hang out here whenever, I don’t care. Just one thing, then you can get back to your homework, I know you Russians study a lot-” you realize he is talking about your book. He pauses for a moment. The situation is so odd you find yourself almost saying _I am Ukrainian actually but thank you._ “What I’m saying is if Theo’s ever going through anything you can’t help her with and you don’t want to go to Xandra…like if she gets any weird people from New York asking after her…anything you feel like you can’t help her with or handle on your own, you can come to me. Because the thing is.” He pauses, like a written line emphasized in a movie script. “She has, well, a fortune, quite a bit of money, back home.”

You’re not sure what to make of this. You think if she really had a lot of money she wouldn’t let the two of you go days only eating bread and sugar, and she’d buy nice beds for Popchyk, one for every room, maybe she’d even buy those expensive clothes from the thick fashion magazines she reads on the newsstands. You’ll have to ask later. Maybe you’re not understanding. “I know she doesn’t feel comfortable doing that right now, this is all new to her, and I mean of course kids can’t be expected to handle finances like that,” Mr. Decker says. You can almost hear Theo sarcastically repeating that to you and saying _it sure is new._ “But if anything, you know, unusual happens you can come right to me. I’ll take care of it.”

Like what? You want to ask. You know he’s involved with things that are not quite legal. He’s always distracted, in a way, by what he does. If there was any “trouble” he wouldn’t notice, maybe, because there is and he hasn’t; he doesn’t know his daughter tries to die sometimes. That’s “unusual,” especially because by now, it happens so much, and he doesn’t know. Even your father might notice if you tried to kill yourself at least once a week. But, also, most adults wouldn’t call you a “kid.” Most adults who aren’t your father haven’t seen you as one for a very long time.

“Sure, Mr. Decker,” you say, nodding your head. His eyes look a bit odd. He gets up falteringly and walks away, his footsteps loud enough to startle Popchyk awake. You shiver from the air conditioning and put a blanket over Theo, still asleep like a rock on the couch. You hope she has no bad dreams tonight, but if she does, you’re right there.

_

 _“I fled from the past. From things you could never know or understand,”_ says the woman in the old movie, _Cat People_. It’s late October and the classic movie channel has been playing all these horror films. In this one she is a panther-woman who cannot escape her true nature. She tries to tell her fiancé but he doesn’t seem to understand. The head doctors cannot help her. She is who she is.

“I always used to watch these old horror movies with my mom,” says Theo, her voice sad but in the way where she’s reminiscing, and she’s confiding in you and sharing, not in the way where she’s about to try and jump out a window or set the house on fire. “I don’t think we ever saw this one.” You’ve never seen it either, but you like it a lot. The panther-woman, Irena, reminds you of Theo in a way. Beautiful and gentle, but with so many secrets, and full of fear, afraid even of herself.

You can feel her whole body heave as she sighs, given that your arm is around her shoulder, which she at first seemed a bit apprehensive about but didn’t move. All the other people at your school, the teachers even maybe, are at parties, probably, doing something for the Halloween party. But it’s just you and Theo and little Popchyk, at home together, relaxing, and not a single one of you have any complaint about it. (“If you’re not going to go to a party or dress up, watching horror movies is the best way to celebrate,” Theodora told you about this holiday, even though from what she’s told you, she does that even when it’s not the holiday.)

Your arm, around her shoulder, hasn’t moved and you find your hand is touching hers. “Uh…sorry,” she says uncomfortably, but you don’t move.

“Sorry for what?” you say. “Now shh. Commercials are over now.” Xandra is out busy managing the bar; she will probably be busy all night with everyone going out to party. “Who knows what the fuck my father is doing,” Theo had said earlier, “but we have the house to ourselves.” 

Despite what Theo has told you about this holiday in America, not a single person rings your doorbell, and so you eat all the candy together by yourselves, with vodka and beer too. Wrappers on the ground, with orange and purple and green holiday colors, different from what these candies usually sell as when you get them from the store or the old vending machine.

“That was a good movie,” Theodora tells you drowsily at the end, lying on the couch like it’s a bed with you next to her, your elbow propping up your head as the next movie begins.

“She reminded me of you, Princess,” you say gently, pinching her shoulder, but she seems to not be able to hear. This is better than some other days. Going right to sleep is better than being sick and wanting to die.

Her face is half-covered with hair, the way she’s reclined. She doesn’t say anything about what you said. “This was way better than going to some dumb party where a drunk senior guy spills his beer on us while trying to grind and we’re expected to wear some ugly polyester iParty lingerie costume that costs too much money to wear once,” she mumbles, not all at once, and you get her general idea well enough. The parties of your classmates, in addition to weak beer and guys who will get their hands all over you and then call you a slut the next day, probably would have involved a lot of irritating “jokes”. _The scary Russian girl doesn’t even need a costume. Who invited the Manson girls?_ Not that you are really hurt by it, but you know Theo doesn’t like it, and you hate to see her upset by people who aren’t worth it.

“You want to go to bed now?” you ask. The idea of sleeping here, you don’t even mind, the couch so soft and intimate, the room so quiet and expansive, you think as you switch the television off with the remote. (You’ve been places where you had to do it manually, you remember vaguely.) Empty candy wrappers are still on the floor, the rug is sideways and curled up from Popchyk playing with it (neither of you can tell him no), your schoolbags are by the couch, overturning, papers falling out.

“That sounds great,” she says, sounding slightly more awake as she pushes herself up. She smiles a little, you can see a few of her teeth, shyly coming out. “And it’s Saturday tomorrow,” she tells you like a revealed secret, “we can sleep all day if we want.” Well, the two of you never really sleep all day, there’s too much to do. All morning, sure.

Her eyes flicker open, closed, like a broken light, but she’s still awake, as the two of you walk upstairs to bed. She begins to lie down, says, “oh. Of course,” and goes to her drawer to put on her nightgown as you reach into your bag and take out the big shirt and flannel pants you sleep in.

In bed you put an arm around her. Popchyk is running around the room, soon he will grow tired and join you two. “November now,” you tell her. “The winter comes here in this desert, yes?”

“Probably,” she says, “just without the snow, I guess.” You consider that, winter with no snow. “Good night, Slava,” she says, and you know she is too tired to want to talk now. And she doesn’t want to think, you realize, about how she doesn’t know everything about this place for a reason, and how maybe she thinks she doesn’t belong here, and thinking too much about belonging places always causes grief.

You trace a little circle on her hand with your fingertip. “Sleep well, my Princess,” you say. The moonlight shines through the window- a full moon, golden in the night, cool as metal. You do not know what the weekend will bring, but you are confident you will find enjoyment in it, the two of you.

A growling noise comes, you feel so hungry it could be you, but it’s her stomach. You laugh a little. “Shut up,” she says playfully, “and don’t even think of asking me to eat that sugar bread stuff again,” she insists, but with affection. Again, that day, you’d tried to call Dominos, saying you had a Halloween party, but they didn’t deliver, as usual, so you had to satisfy yourselves with convenience store pepperoni Combos, which was certainly not the same. Tomorrow, after the holiday, all the candy will be on sale, so the two of you will definitely take advantage of that. You might not even have to lift for it, because Mr. Decker has been giving you both money since he’s been doing well lately.

“No fear, Princess. I will get you all the sale Halloween chocolates in the store you want,” you say, half-asleep, smelling the vodka on both your breath, your foreheads almost touching, “but you must share with me.”

In the shadows you can see her smile, just a little. “Just not too early in the morning,” she says, “other than that, I can’t wait. We’ll buy them out…” she says, trailing off because she is so tired. You think of the movie, and Irena waking from her sleep, tormented by the past, the village, the things that were in her that she couldn’t get rid of, afraid of herself, afraid of being close to anyone. And you can feel Popchyk walk near your head and lie down on your pillow.

“Good night, Snaps,” you kiss him, and when you turn your head back around, Theo is passed out sleeping, not looking peaceful like she’s having a good dream, and not shaking and tossing like when she has a bad dream, just lying there, deeply at rest, her body making up for all the sleep she’s lost out on lately, and soon, yours does the same.

_

The sky is black, gleaming with silver stars, like the velour tracksuits you tried on a while ago, such an odd thing to think of, so simultaneously flashy and dark in a way Americans possibly do best. Neon lights at two in the morning. Against this light is the blue of the swimming pool. It reflects on Theo’s face as you lie down on towels by the pool the two of you have lain down. But she rises up quickly, her waist moving and her legs in place, almost like a gymnast’s movements, and she grabs your wrist so hard you think something is wrong and you almost flinch but then you see her face, her mouth barely open like she’s about to say something but can’t.

She’s looking down at you, reclined, the blood near drying on your face. Tonight your father beat you so hard you just stayed on the ground for a while, but he passed out, and Theo and Popchyk got away, and you thought, I can take it, I’ve done this before. But Theo had been so worried and you almost passed out and your nose bled and bled.

“Are you all right?” you ask, now that you’re feeling better. You thought you were going to collapse and you weren’t even worried, you just felt like you were tired, like you were moving underwater even when you got out of the pool. That is how you know it’s bad, when you barely feel it anymore. Sometimes you worry for what being your father’s daughter will mean for you in the future, what it will mean for everyone in your path. But for now, you are just trying to get through it, not alone.

“Slava,” she says, her voice shaking, her hand gripping you, and you take her hand in your free hand, and you nod your head, telling her to go on. You’re worried if you say anything- even the _do not worry I am fine_ you have prepared - she will try and laugh or say, never mind. You wonder if she’s going to ask you something about your father for a moment. You wonder if she knows something about you that you didn’t realize she knew.

“Never leave me,” she says, and you’re about to reassure her that you’re still right here, but she says it again and pulls you close, and you put your arms around her like the way you do when she wakes up afraid, but she pulls her head back to look you dead in the eye, “never leave me, Slava,” and she’s pressing her forehead to your face.

“No,” you promise her, “I never will, okay,” and you wish she wasn’t in this much pain but you think in this moment it isn’t quite pain, or that’s not all it is, and her mouth is on yours, and you feel her soft lips sticking to your bloodstained face, and you’re carrying her inside even though the towels are still on the ground. It’s dark in the house but you can still see from the moon and stars reflecting off the water. In the dim light Theo’s eyes are heavy-lidded and your blood is on her lips and her hair drips onto the couch, the floor, and you think yours is too, and you’re both so cold from the water and the air conditioning and are holding onto each other like you can’t let yourselves let go, and her eyes widen, unblinking.

“I love you,” she tells you, aloud, even though you think you knew, and you think this means she must know, too, but you can never be sure, and you think she’s not used to being wanted anymore, let alone loved.

“I love you too,” you say, and you don’t care that it’s the middle of the night in the dark and you’re all alone and even the dog is asleep, you don’t care that this is what everyone at your school suspects the two of you do and hates you for it, you don’t care that soon the morning will come and you’ll never be able to do it then, because if you’re trapped then you’re trapped together and if all you have is the night then no one will ever take that from either of you. “You know that, right?”

She just stares at you in the dark, and says yes almost inaudibly, like she doesn’t realize she’s saying it, and closes her eyes and raises her arms so they’re around your neck and whispers in your ear, “ _you’re safe_ ,” she says, her wet hair cleaning your face off just a bit, your blood staining her hair, and you think you believe her, you don’t believe a lot of what she says even when she does, but she means this.

You draw back from kissing her. “Is it okay?” you ask, just to be sure.

She looks away for a second. “I think about it all the time,” she says like confessing to a crime. You take her face in your hands.

“Then it is okay,” you tell her, and she is reassured by that.

“I love you, Slava,” she says it again, her head against your neck, and you hold her in your arms and outside the wind is howling against the glass door and you don’t know how far away the closest people are aside from the two of you and you are glad, not because you’re afraid, but because you want to forget everything else in the world for now, just until morning, and you are telling her she is safe and you love her and you will always be here right next to her.


	2. The Crane Wife

II: The Crane Wife

_“Since you have seen who I really am, I am afraid you can no longer love me.”_ \- The Crane Wife, Keigo Seki

_1/4:_

_Dear Mom, I feel like this year is going to be something different, in a good way. I feel like every day has all just felt like one long day, like how all the different colors of a sunset are all in the same sky? I know I wrote the other day I wanted to die but today I don’t feel like it exactly. I feel sad but also that’s not all I feel. I don’t know how to describe it. Sometimes I feel like I’m less alone now. But sometimes I still feel alone. I don’t know if I can really put this in words. Maybe later I’ll be able to explain it better…I hope you could understand it, the way I’m telling it now, because there’s a lot to say, and I don’t know how to get it across._

_

A whole long weekend all to yourselves for a holiday (“Presidents’ Day”) and you and Theo have used some of the Christmas money her dad gave you both to pay for a weekend in a motel about a half-hour’s walk down the highway. Her dad and Xandra are at a nice hotel on the Strip for the weekend. You have Popchyk in a bag with you, because you can’t just leave him alone at the house for the weekend, which means you couldn’t really bring your own alcohol, but it’s only for a few days and maybe if the two of you drink you wouldn’t be able to control yourselves and the people who run the motel would kick you out and you’d have wasted all the money.

Theo is lying back on the old sea-blue-and-hunter-green tartan bedspread. “No dad…no Xandra…no school…no one to tell us what to do,” she says with dreamy vacancy. You were once compared to the moon. She is like a sad gray cloud. Thick with a storm, so burdened, but sometimes you think she could just float away. Stay by the planet of Earth, you want to say sometimes, do not leave. If neither of us can have our feet on the ground, let us be up, floating, drifting, together.

You slide back on the bed next to her, causing the mattress to cave in a little, and both of you bounce. She laughs. “Are you trying to knock me off? The bed is all yours now?” she jokes; both of you always share halves of the beds and the dividing line always blurs with the both of you at the center. You roll over so that you’re on top of her and start tickling her until she starts squealing with laughter, grabbing your shoulders in her hands and shaking you, both of you moving so wildly that neither of you can sustain it and within moments you’re tangled together laughing wordlessly, uncontrollably, lying on your side as she is lying on her back, your face almost touching hers. You put your arm around her midsection, and can feel both your pulses racing like you’ve just ran.

She stays stiff for a moment but then smiles a little. You get the sense she won’t talk about this part again once the weekend is over and you go back home. “I feel like we’re on the run from the law,” she says with mischief in her matter-of-fact voice. “Like we’re hiding out.” You remember that Tom the boy who wasn’t her boyfriend (even if he kind of sounded like he was) would get in trouble with her, the smoking rebel boy and the frowning, outsider burnout girl who, according to the family she lived with, the girls in younger grades were afraid of, Theodora as Bonnie Parker with her old-fashioned clothes and outcast status and rule-breaking and mystery.

“We are not doing anything wrong!” you tell her, tapping her forehead with a finger gently. But you understand. No one you know knows who you are. It’s like you’re doing something secret together. You sit up and then rapidly lie back down, the mattress bouncing, knocking Theo into you as she yells, laughing, her face so close to yours you can smell the Pepsi on her breath, see the smallest of scars, like dust spots, under her eyes where glass pieces cut her at the museum. Your hair is, as always, so tangled you wonder if hers would catch in yours and you’d be stuck together until you found a comb or conditioner, or tore yourselves apart.

She doesn’t always black out. She doesn’t always drink that much. You know she must remember. She just never talks about it in the morning and neither do you.

Theo quickly stands up and starts jumping, her head almost reaching the pinkish stucco ceiling. “I haven’t done this since I was a kid,” she tells you, “but even then I never liked to do it that much? I just assumed it was against the rules and all the noise reminded me of my dad.” But she’s still going after a few jumps.

“I want to jump and see if I can land on rug,” you point to a circular, leaf-patterned rug opposite the bed. Interesting, there are hardly any leaves in this city. By the bureau, the remains of a broken table (you and Theo had danced on it like you saw in the movie on the TV, breaking it) are haphazardly hidden. But by the time you leave, they can’t do anything about it- you smile thinking of how many times you’ve woken up to Xandra’s _what the hell is this, girls, it looks like a hurricane came through the house! How do you the two of you even manage to make such a mess?_

“You could hit the wall or the TV and get really hurt!” Theo warns you, now tired, on her back on the bed again, wrapping herself in the plaid bedspread. You hadn’t expected the February weather to be so cold here, but you’re also grateful you get a break from the freezing air conditioning at her house. You remember Judy saying, people do things they don’t mean when they’re drunk. Sober Theodora is gentle and careful and doesn’t want anyone, including herself, to get hurt, even if she is so sad and doesn’t take enough care of herself. You have never seen Theodora when she is sober try to kill herself. But you’re not sure if she knows after that she does it. Maybe she is the opposite of your father in every single way.

From your jumps you can see the whole of the room, except the bathroom: the rumpled bed, the candy and sodas on the ground, the old TV with the antenna, currently off, Popchyk sleeping on the cushioned chair, the window which gives you a view of the parking lot in the late afternoon.

You lie back down next to her and sigh dramatically, deep from the bottom of your stomach. Theo yawns- in place of drinking over this holiday the two of you have just spent your nights talking, watching TV, and looking at the stars, getting even less sleep than usual. She looks like she’s about to fall asleep.

“You’re my best friend, Slava,” she says quietly, self-consciously. “I’ve never had as good or close a friend as you. I never thought I’d…be close to anyone again after what happened.” She looks hesitant to do so but she embraces you, quickly but so tight, the way she does when she is waking up from a bad dream.

As she’s letting go you take her by the shoulders gently and look her in the face, getting closer to her. “You are blood of my heart, Theo,” you tell her seriously, making sure she understands she isn’t alone, even if you are alone together. She looks at you, her eyes wide and mouth just about to open, like she wants to say something, or like she’s waiting for you to go on. She nods a little, just barely. “It is like we share something very deep inside. We should always be together.” She smiles a little, but stays quiet, almost too intimidated to speak. Sometimes you think she is too afraid to say what she means, even to those notebooks she writes in all the time. The secrets stay inside of her. And so the words she says are often, by extension, not exactly true. But there are reasons for that, and you cannot judge her for them. You are not always honest.

“Yes,” she says. Maybe it’s all she can say right now.

Popchyk interrupts the two of you, jumping on top of the bed, wanting to be played with, which the two of you instantly give him, rubbing and patting him. You lift him up to Theo’s face so he can lick her and she giggles.

“We walk him soon, Princess,” you say. “He is restless.”

“Sure,” she says. “Tonight…we should look at the stars again.” When you lie next to her you love to look at her face. And you love to look at the same thing together. Time has gone by so fast this winter, since this glittering, American Christmas in the desert. It’s seamless, like movie scenes transitioning one from another, vivid like a real technicolor classic. You’re happy, you think, and you think she is too, even if she doesn’t remember happiness well enough to recognize it. Sometimes there are a lot of things you want to tell her but you think she can figure out on her own without you. You know she can. She just needs to know she can.

“Never any stars in New York,” you say, “I am sure of that. Too many lights in the city.”

“Yeah,” she says softly. “Night is just the other side of day there. Nothing stops.” You could see the stars every night in Papua New Guinea and in Karmeywallag and in the long, long nights in Alaska, but then, you liked the northern lights the best. Sometimes at the pool at her house you can see the stars too, you just usually don’t think to look. This is not a motel with a pool, though, and so the two of you satisfy yourselves by going to the parking lot at night. The traveling salesman next door tells you, be careful, girls. Maybe it’s a bit late for that, maybe it’s the kind of warning that is well-meaning but ignorant to reality, but the both of you buy his candy anyway.

Nothing stops, you think, staring out the window, listening to the rush of cars, both your steady breathing. “I don’t hate it here anymore,” she says under her breath slowly, “not really…” You don’t either. Sometimes you’ve hated places only when you’ve been there, and once you leave, you don’t anymore, no matter what happened there. Now, you think, living in America isn’t something you have to struggle through one day at a time, not so much anymore. The days and nights both have their good and bad, and you accept them both. You consider saying this. She is taking your hand and moving closer to you. Popchyk is running around on the carpet, playing with a scrap of paper.

“We should go for a walk,” she says, rising from the bed, even though it’s cold out for the desert. But you have sweatshirts. “Take him with us.” You look for the dog leash.

“I wonder what people will think,” she says, “I always used to see complete strangers and find them so interesting. I wonder what people will see in us. These two girls and a dog walking down the highway…” She’s looking out the window, away from you, trailing off like she’s in a dream.

Sometimes you wonder what people see. A lot of the time they make it plain, if it’s the people who talk to you. But the ones who only know you from seeing far away…you hadn’t thought about that so much. Maybe it’s a New York thing; she spent most of her life seeing thousands more people than she’d ever be able to talk to every minute. But you think it also runs deeper in her than location, this need to know what others think of her. Sometimes you think she is like the bird. She is chained. But so far away from others. They do not hold the chain and they never will, and they will never find the room of imprisonment where she goes around in an endless closed circle like the chained bird….

Popchyk has his leash on, but you pick him up in your arms anyway. Theodora turns around from the window and walks somewhat aimlessly toward you.

“I think they will see from their cars, and wonder where we came from,” you say. Maybe they will wonder where you are going. But that, you think, will be secondary. Theo seems to like your answer, and smiles a little.

“It’s like having a secret from the whole world,” she says almost wistfully, and the both of you walk out the door, Popchyk already running ahead, straining at his leash as you step into the parking lot.

_

You know Theo doesn’t like the world very much, not any more. But, even if she doesn’t quite say it in these terms, there’s a lot she does like about it. She likes culture and art and beauty and things that are unique and special. Always talking about art and high fashion and music and literature. You like to think you’ve taught her a lot, but she’s taught you some too.

Sometimes you want to show her those things you’ve seen, the ones you don’t think you should keep a secret from her for now. Or maybe you just like to think of her seeing them on her own, wanting to, being independent and safe one day. You want her to be able to see the Northern Lights flat on her back in the earth. The sunrise over the ocean in Papua New Guinea, her feet in the water, sinking into the sand. There are some things out in the world that cannot be turned into a symphony or a painting or any kind of thing she likes so much, and maybe this is sometimes because they are too awful, and maybe sometimes because they are too different. They have to be their own thing. But anyway, you think of the things on the planet you’ve seen, you want to see, and you wish she could see too, and then maybe she’d change her mind and think she it’s not that she doesn’t like the world, it’s that she doesn’t like what people do to it.

_

“The guidance counselor told me that we were _troubled girls_ ,” Theo rolls her eyes, explaining her meeting to you while you ride the bus. Under her eyes are little gray circles, not as pronounced as yours. Light green glitter on her dark eyelids. “Yeah, I guess we are. I just said, well, I’m dealing with a lot the best I can, and so is Slava, and then I said I had to go back to my class.” She pauses, looks a little guilty. “I didn’t want you to get dragged into it. I didn’t want to tell them much about you.” But you smile at her. Of course you’re not angry with her, of course they brought you into it- who is always next to her, that these school people surely take notice of all the time, especially from how everyone talks about you so much?

“ _Troubled_!” you raise your eyebrows, say it with the kind of inflection American actors say in old movies, _I say!_ “Whole world is troubled. War, natural disasters, human oppression. But _we_ are trouble,” you say.

“I mean…it felt like I was in trouble but for nothing. They’re not saying we did anything wrong or have to do anything. It’s more like they’re trying to be, I don’t know, like a therapist or something. Like they’re not getting us in trouble so much as, they think we’re in a state of trouble. Like at my old school,” Theodora’s voice gives a defeated-sounding explanation. You decide, tonight after school, you are going to give her a real party to make her forget all this school bullshit.

You consider this. “We are in _state of trouble_ ,” you tell her and shrug. “What do they care? And what business is it of theirs?”

“You know, Slava,” Theo says after a moment, her head against the glass window of the bus, exhaling deeply until you can see a little cloud of her breath on the window. “You’re exactly right. That was what I was thinking in New York every time I had to see the counselor.” She closes her eyes for a minute and you wonder if she’s drifting off- the two of you hardly ever get good rest. “Sometimes I hate being right about shit like that even if it makes me feel, well, at least I _knew_.”

You nod your head. What she is saying, you can understand. You put a hand on her shoulder and lean forward. Sometimes you worry for what she doesn’t know, sometimes you worry for what she doesn’t realize she knows. “Never hate being right, Princess,” you tell her solemnly. She hates herself constantly and for everything- maybe she is more aware than she lets on to you about things she knows, one of the things she hasn’t told you.

She looks at you, long and hard, and nods silently. Something more than sleeplessness is making her eyes look sorrowful. Then she blinks, and it’s gone.

“What would you do,” she says, almost dreamily, but quickly, “if he just drove us right into the city and left us there?”

“Ah, I don’t know,” you say, thinking about it, just the two of you, not in a vacant house or a high school or an abandoned playground, but one of the biggest cities you’ve ever been. “But, we would figure it out pretty quick, and do very well for ourselves.” Or maybe you’d just be on the streets like those weeks with your friends Maks and Seryozha, but you like to think now you’re older, and in a different country, and with Theo, no one can stop either of you even if you begged them to.

When you went on Christmas with her father, it was a great night, but you also wished you were an adult, or at least independent, so you could have explored it. _Beautiful Women_ , said a marquee, and if you were an adult you’d wear sunglasses at night and a fine leather coat and high boots, and Theo would dress like one of the women in the old movies on the TV and stand serious and confident and mysterious, and you’d tell her, this place is named for us. _Old Western Style Saloon_ said a window and if you were both 21 or had good ID’s you’d both go in and all the biker guys and Vegas casino mafiosos would look at you and their eyebrows would go up when they saw the two tiny girls could drink them all under a table and you’d ask Theo to explain all the American references on the wall art, in the old music, and she’d know. You’d go around to the building made to look like the Eiffel Tower and see what that was all about and she’d probably say it was a poor copy but you’d enjoy yourselves all the same. You want to be her friend until and when you’re both adults. You have a feeling that she doesn’t see adulthood in her future, the way you do.

“Shit. Are you asleep? Bus is almost there,” you whisper to her, seeing her eyes are closed again.

“I fucking wish I was back asleep,” she says.

“Well,” you tell her, “that is what homeroom is for.” The teacher never pays any attention, just looks at the magazine.

She gives an exhale that’s halfway to a laugh and smiles a little. “I’m up for cutting again sometime this week. Just to sleep in all day. If you want.”

“Nothing better,” you say dramatically,” and the bus creaks like it’s about to fall apart as it pulls in front of the school, already crowded outside. If any of the people on the bus are saying things about either of you today, you can’t hear them.

“They _asked_ for trouble,” she says sarcastically, getting her bag, as the two of you get off the bus and walk into school anyway.

_

On Wednesdays Theodora’s last period is Algebra, which always runs a little late. She skips it sometimes to hang out with you, because last period on Wednesdays for you is a free block anyway, but lately she’s been skipping a bit too much and doesn’t want too much trouble. So you and Kotku are together, waiting for her. You nicknamed her that because she has a little cat tattooed on her, but her name is Kerry. She has such unusual eyes, almost neon, like she is from outer space, and she is tiny and short- even smaller than Theo who is little as Dyuymovochka- but strong like a wire, and with that orange-and-black hair and her and cool clothes she looks like one of those people in the futuristic looking music videos you watch on MTV in her place. But really, you admit, she is the one with her feet most firm on the ground out of the three of you. You’re all going to go to the mall- Kotku made some money from painting some classmates’ nails after school and would like to pick up this Lil Kim CD, you think you should get a new collar for Popchyk because he’s outgrowing his old one.

You don’t know why you never spent much time with Kotku before. Probably because she’s a little older. But she’s so much like you it’s almost surprising to have found her. Before Theodora you had thought, in many respects, you were the only girl who existed who was like you, who didn’t belong, who was like something out of another world. 

(Theo had said, looking down at the ground, “But … you know people say things about her, right?” and you said, but people say things about you and me too, and she’d seemed a little upset, like she couldn’t bring herself to mention some of it. You asked if it really mattered what people said, and she said, yes, it does. She’d acted stiff and intimidated around Kotku at first when you’d all hung out at the house and smoked together, but then seemed to warm up a little, and when Kotku went back home Theo said, “you know, she kind of reminds me of you a little.” You suppose the two of you dress and even kind of look like. “Like kind of scary-looking but all right I guess. I thought she was pretty imposing. I guess because she’s kind of goth and serious and looks grown up and I was worried…I hope people don’t…” she’d trailed off, still high but sober enough to censor herself, and you’d tried to make a joke of it, “ah, I am scary now? I am all right you guess?” and she’d laughed and said, maybe, and you said, “are you mad she broke your record for being most tiny little girl in Vegas? Can pick up both of you at same time!” you said, trying to lift her, and she laughed and said, you wish.

“You know it is good to have many friends,” you told her much later, when you were sharing some vodka, not that you were much of an authority on having many real friends at once, but you were always up for new experiences. “We of course can still be together all the time just two of us!” She looked like she was about to say something sarcastic to you. “Is just, she is very much like us.”

“Fine. She is like us,” Theo said, morose, her face a little pink, curling into herself the way she sometimes does. She sounded about to cry, her voice pained and bitter. “Does it really not bother you that people call you the things they do? That they call me the things they do? I fucking hate it. The way they talk about Kotku’s mom, how does anyone even know her mom? People back home didn’t know my mom. And no matter what she did some people just never thought she was good enough. And I’ll never be fucking good enough for anyone and I wish no one knew I was alive sometimes. I wish I could walk away into the desert and never be seen again. Fuck. Does Kotku say it’s like that for her too? She ever wish she could die? I don’t care who she makes out with or if she gets high or any of that stuff, I really don’t, but I mean doesn’t she ever want to be like everyone else? Does she ever wish she could be someone else so people wouldn’t hate her? That’s what it is to be like me.”

“Hey,” you told her, holding onto her shoulder, steadying her, as she seemed to be about to fall off the couch, not that you were much steadier. “Do I hate you? Do I think you are not good enough for me?” She sniffled a little, shaking her head without looking at you. “Do you hate you? Do you think you are not good enough?” She was silent, holding onto you, leaning against you, quiet except for sniffling.)

“Now Kotku, you begin to ask, a bit unsure. “I am not, ah, judging…” She raises her eyebrows a little, and looks like she’s about to laugh. You always ask the funniest questions, she says. The other day you asked her if she could buy you and Theo some drinks once she turns eighteen and she laughed and said you have to be twenty-one in America and you were incredulous but by that time Theo was so fucked up she started laughing uncontrollably and said she hopes she isn’t still on this earth when she’s that old, so both of you tried to calm her down after that, you held onto her and tried to soothe her while Kotku said, there are so many reasons to want to grow up.

“You know you can ask me whatever and it isn’t weird,” she says. She once told you that you were “one of the only people here who don’t fucking hate me.” Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s why all three of you, even Theo, get along pretty well, even if it is usually just you and Theo.

(You’ve told her some of the things you don’t want to make Theodora listen to and Kotku gets it but sometimes it surprises you in the way she reacts. _Slava that wasn’t an “it is what it is” thing even if I guess stuff like that happens a lot, it’s really fucked up and sad that happened_ , kind of things she says sometimes. And you respond with things like, _I thought you would understand_ and she looks at you, her big neon eyes all sad and compassionate, _the thing is I do._ And sometimes she asks if you ever tell Theo about these things. Some things with your dad, your mom, and some other things too.

“I thought you told me you think she is so innocent, cannot handle it,” you said.

“I mean I know she’s been through really bad shit, she told me, you told me, and I’m glad you both did. It’s not good to not have people to tell that kind of thing to. I wouldn’t have known that just from looking at her, it’s just like she’s so soft and gentle that she’s kind of out of place. But you guys are each other’s best friends, you should tell her this stuff too,” Kotku had gone on, smudging some eyeliner out of the corner of her eye.

“Oh,” you said, “well I suppose you are right,” the two of you are always disagreeing the way you imagine a mature older sister and a fun younger sister to, but then you wanted to change the subject so you started asking about why the drinking age in America is like that.) 

“Do you ever want to leave?” you ask her. Your whole life has been leaving, leaving, leaving, perpetual motion. But Kotku has been in Vegas for as long as she’s been alive. You can’t imagine it. You remember the song she played on her CD player. _Hell is a place called home_. Maybe she was trying to say that by playing the song.

“All the time,” she says. “All the time I wish I could leave for real. Not like when I ran away. New state, maybe. Somewhere I can be my own person and not what everyone thinks I am.” (The other day you and Theo went to this party with Kotku and she got high and got into a fight with this drunk girl because the drunk girl said some shit about her mom and it was really crazy and Theo watched behind her fingers and kept saying _oh no Slava tell her to stop,_ and Kotku kept screaming at the other girl _fuck you fuck you fuck you_ and the next morning you said, “ha! You showed her,” because she definitely won, but Kotku shook her head and said, “I’m so fucking tired of all this. I just want to be done here already.”) But I mean, I don’t want to leave my mom.” You nod your head. This is understandable.

You see Theodora walking over to you, wearing a pair of your black jeans and one of her lacy blouses, her glasses down her nose, waving her hand a little but not calling out. As she gets closer she walks faster. “Hey,” she almost whispers to the two of you excitedly.

“Hey yourself, baby,” says Kotku, at the same time you say, _finally, Princess, felt like we waited for years!_ “what’s up? You still on to go to the mall?”

She nods, rolling her eyes. “I’m so sick of that school. The sooner we go out the better,” she gestures towards you, “we should have cut today, honestly. Nothing even happened, it was just like, I thought it would never end.”

“Hey, is okay,” you tell her, the three of you beginning to walk away from the school now. “Tomorrow is Saturday. And now we can do what we want,” you personally are looking forward to the mall food court, where they have cinnamon rolls, “but then, don’t we always! Ha!” You nudge Theo and she smiles just a little.

“It’ll go by real fast, baby,” Kotku tells Theo. “You’ll look back and think, it all happened, and a lot more will happen too.”

When you make your way to the bus stop it’s almost time for the shuttle that will drop you off at the mall to arrive. The bus stop usually has only a few people there, usually, people who work at the mall, or elderly people. Today, since it’s a Friday, there are a few more people. But you all manage to fit yourselves on the same bus seat together, even though it’s meant for two people, you all shove yourselves in there, and the driver doesn’t notice or else he’d probably tell you it isn’t safe. You’re by the window, Theo is in the middle, Kotku is at the edge.

Theo is just staring out the window quietly. You wonder what really happened today. Sometimes she just has down days even if nothing in particular happened. Or maybe, you think is equally possible, something did happen, or at least she remembered something that did and couldn’t stop thinking about it, and hasn’t said so yet. Maybe later tonight she’ll want to talk about it.

“Man,” Kotku says, noticing Theo looking out at the desert, so many shades of red and orange, the blue sky. “It’s really a good view, isn’t it? I always wonder what people who aren’t from here think.” You can tell she really loves it here, loves it in a way you and Theo never can. The way Theo loves the New York she knew.

“Oh,” says Theo as if she almost forgot to respond, “yeah. Wow. I guess I’ll never forget it here,” she says, “no matter where else I go.” Earlier in the morning you’d said something that was too positive about her father and she told you all he was good for was running off and she hopes he doesn’t try pulling that again and expecting her to come along. You told her you’d come with her, he’d be okay with that, and she said, I hate that he can just tell me what to do, even though he barely ever does, I hate it the way _you_ hate it, and you understood then. Sometimes you think remembering a place is a way of paying respect. It was worth remembering, even if you didn’t like it, you’re just one person, and sometimes you have to remember things that aren’t so great, and sometimes other people’s perspectives and yours can be right, and sometimes you can’t just blame a place for what happens in it or what people there did. Because of where you were before, you ended up here now, that is just how it is.

“You’re officially not a tourist anymore if you can leave Vegas and remember,” Kotku says playfully. “You guys are from here, too, now.”

You shrug. “I am from everywhere,” you say, “every place, so not really one place.” But still, the one place, all the single places, they count.

Theo doesn’t answer for a minute, she just looks at you. You remember when you forgot the Russian word for dragonfly last year, and the other day, when Theo told you, shaking, she couldn’t remember how many floors her building had in New York. She looks down and for a moment you think she’s about to cry, but then she raises her head, leans back against the seat.

“Our school smells like aftershave and cleaning supplies,” she says, “first thing we do in the mall is, we go to the perfume counter and get samples.” She likes to get samples of the expensive stuff- there’s a heart-shaped one called Princess you always tease her about. Kotku likes the bottles in dark colors.

The bus hits a bump in the road and Kotku grabs the seat, and you brace yourself, and Theo holds onto you. “Every time I am surprised,” you say, shaking your head. It’s because you always get distracted.

Theo shrugs. “Not as bad as the subway,” she says, “anyway, it means we’re almost there. And Friday it’s open late…” she says a bit suggestively. Ever since you and her started getting out of the house more, you realize how she goes between not wanting to leave and not wanting to go anywhere near it. You suppose you understand. Over the many years you’ve lived in many houses with your father, you’ve often decided his absence doesn’t mean you have to stay in.

“Good for them to keep us in mind. We live late,” you say, and the bus goes forward.

_

You and Theodora, sitting at a table in a dimly lit house party and the windows are open and the air is flat. You’ve been there for hours. At the beginning Theo was a little shy and stayed so close to you that your shoulders were practically touching. But the music was fun even if it wasn’t great so you danced and waved your head and arms around and the guys seemed to like that a lot which you always think is kind of funny because you’ve never thought you were that pretty (even though once you thought one of Theo’s notebooks was a school book so you opened it and she was talking about how your _angular face and black hair and long limbs_ make you look _like a painting of a baroque martyress_ , and you closed the notebook because she probably wouldn’t want you to read her journal and she wouldn’t like if she saw you doing it even if it was an accident). And some of those boys’ girlfriends looked annoyed with you, but you suppose it’s just like that sometimes. It isn’t your fault that they were taught things like _act a certain way and everything will be perfect for you_ and, like all other platitudes people in this country spit out so self-assuredly, it turns out to be untrue. You drank some, and Theo drank some more, and you were jumping on the couch along to some fast song while someone threw around a beach ball and all the people were tossing it to one another, and somewhere along the line neither of you could find Theo’s ice-pink fake-angora sweater you found for her at the mall and in her tank top she kept saying _wow I guess I didn’t need it, it isn’t cold_ because the air conditioning in this house isn’t so bad as hers, and then you got a little tired of moving around, and you placed a hand on her shoulder and said let’s go in another room, and she shrugged and nodded and took the lead. 

And some boy with a letterman jacket is there in between you with his arm around you and Theo is staring dead-eyed into her drink and the boy- you think his name is Tyler or something, he’s talked to Kotku so he probably knows who you are- begins talking. “You guys are like opposites,” he says appreciatively, his red cup going to his mouth, as he talks in the _wow man is she hot_ way American boys have when evaluating girls. “The party girl who likes to go crazy and the shy girl who’s always quiet…” You put your finger in his drink and lick your fingertip. Cheap beer.

Theo raises her head slowly, the ghost of a smile slowly playing across her face, her eyes barely lighting up, a flicker of fire in the darkness, her tousled dark hair framing her face like she’s just entered an ancient candlelit cottage after crossing the Scottish highlands on a day where the wind blows with force like hands moving you, the way your father talks about sometimes but you don’t remember.

“I’m the crazy one,” she says, her little voice scratchy, “and she’s the only one who knows.” The dark of the room shadows her face like someone in an old movie as she fixes her eyes directly on yours across the table for a moment. One of the girls in the crime movies playing on the TV in her house. The mysterious, sad woman with a secret past, and she slinks to the casino table and drinks deep, the liquor trapped in her mouth like her secrets. No one can save her, but no one can have her.

She laughs a little, a quiet, harsh sound. Tyler or whatever his name is goes quiet, looks a little startled. His arm is still around your waist, though. Theodora now is back staring at the table. “No one knows,” she’s saying, or something like it, you can’t quite hear because her voice is murmuring and slurred and the speakers are thumping and the music is playing so loud with that _California rest in peace,_ and you can barely hear Tyler asking, a bit concerned, _hey wait is Leah okay_ because you see her head is resting in one hand. From another room you can see the reflections of some royal purple and dark blue strobe light and some girl shrieking _you go Carl drink drink!_

You get off of the chair you’ve been sharing with Tyler and walk over to the other side of the table, leaning your head down to whisper so no one else hears, even though no one else would hear. That’s how Theo would prefer it- don’t say all her business out in the open. You can picture her, more sober, arguing about it with you. ‘No one can hear, Princess, do not worry, I can shout your social security number and no one will ever know’. ‘But what if someone fucking _did?_ ’

“Do you want to go home, Princess?” you ask. She looks at you, her eyes unfocused. “Is getting late. Tomorrow they have good food at school, yes?”

She blinks a little, her head turning down again like a wilting flower, her glasses almost sliding off her face. “All right,” she says, almost impossible to hear. “If you want. Don’t leave because of me….” She isn’t quite yet on the path to black out, but she’s almost there. You smile a little.

“Oh Princess, remember? We must both leave to take care of Popchyk,” you say, your hands gesturing in a gentle cajole.

“Okay,” she says, so softly you want to take her in your arms and tell her she does not have to sound so sad. Before you know it she’s standing up, unexpectedly quick the way she sometimes is.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, Slava,” she breathes, walking straight ahead even though that’s not the way out, so you take her by the arm and guide her out of the house, the blue-and-purple lights flashing over your faces like some disco club, your head already pounding. 

_

_9/15:_

_Dear Mom, I can’t believe I’m fifteen years old. Even two years ago fifteen sounded so adult. I remember when Mathilde was late to the one Lacoste shoot you brought me to because it was in Central Park and they couldn’t tell me not to come, that one model was fifteen and we hung out trying to play this video game on her phone and I thought she was so grown up. And now I’m fifteen and I still feel so small. I also can’t believe it’s another school year. I guess only three more years of this prison. I don’t really hate Las Vegas so much anymore but do I ever hate this school. Slava says the only reason she goes to school is because of me. I’ve cut school – I know you wouldn’t want to hear that, but it’s true, and I’m not really missing much – but I still go. I guess she comes from such different circumstances but in a way we’re also pretty similar. She met this girl Kerry who she nicknamed Kotku and now we hang out with her a lot too, we have since summer. I was kind of scared of Kotku at first but she’s cool. She’s kind of like us, everyone judges her and calls her these bad names and she doesn’t have a lot of friends, and people don’t like her and she doesn’t have a regular family life, but she gets through it. Like we’re “bad girls” but that’s fine because sometimes the people who call you bad aren’t any better. She’s really protective of me too. We went to this party and this guy who I think was in college or maybe older put something in my drink and I was starting to drift off, and Slava had taken something that made her act insane and she was on this really bad trip, but Kotku got us both out of there and it was horrible and even the next morning Slava looked really bad and sick and I was still shaking from how afraid I’d been but Kotku pulled me in when I couldn’t stop crying and told me we were safe now and no one could hurt us now. Even if one day someone hurt us all again it wouldn’t be today and there because we were all together. But she also said, she wouldn’t let Slava keep saying, take us to this-and-that crazy party in places we should stay away from, because there are a lot of places and people she knows that if you can stay away from them, you do. I haven’t talked about it with Slava since it happened. Kotku has asked me if I want to talk about it. But I don’t know how. Maybe I would if you were here._

_I think Kotku has been through a lot of really bad things. Kind of like how me and Slava have, but maybe different things. And we’ve all told each other some of it, but I don’t think all of us have told each other everything, because I haven’t even told Slava everything after all this time._

_I never got to tell you everything and maybe you never got to tell me everything. I could say that that’s why I’m grateful this past year I’ve become more impulsive and learned to live in the moment and be maybe a little less afraid, a little more free. And I guess I am grateful for that. But that doesn’t mean I can put some kind of silver lining platitude on what happened to us. My name is known across the country as the Attack Girl and I’m sure, somewhere out there, some supporter of those extremists sees me as an unfinished job, and maybe my whole life I’ll go around with a target over my head._

_Sometimes I want to ask Philip about this, but this is the kind of thing you have to talk about in person and I don’t know if I could do that, if it came down to it._

_Some things are just bad. That’s the truth. People will lie about everything but you can’t successfully lie about everything. Some things are just completely bad and you can’t lie about that no matter how hard so many people try. I guess I’ve learned a lot, Mom, even if it’s not nice things, it’s things I needed to realize. I’m not an innocent sweet girl anymore. Maybe I never was the way you might have liked to think I was. I’m sorry for what I’m becoming, for what happened to you, for what I did to lead you into it. Sometimes I think it was always going to happen, but most of the time I blame myself. I’m sorry._

_

Usually, you remember things. The nights. Theo doesn’t when she blacks out but not every night, she doesn’t black out every night, and one night when you held her she whispered to you: _I don’t forget this, I’m going to forget saying this and you’re going to forget it too, but I don’t forget it,_ and you don’t think either of you forgot, but she never talked about it, so you didn’t either.

_

You’re lying on your back on the faded rug in this boy Gavin’s bedroom in his house by Summerlin smoking a joint with him, passing it between each other. You’re not his girlfriend or anything, he just invited you over. Kotku said he does this with a lot of girls and that doesn’t make them his girlfriends. But that’s kind of what you do with guys sometimes. Neither of you really want to be someone’s girlfriend right now, though. Which maybe is another reason why there are always so many rumors about the two of you and poor Theo too, and you don’t like rumors and you try and be careful, but you’re also not going to live your whole life based on rules you’re not clear about.

(“Where did you go after school Tuesday?” Theo recently asked you, clearly upset and jealous. “You didn’t say you wouldn’t be at the bus stop. Were you with some guy again? All the guys here are so dumb. And why are they talking to you _now_? Sometimes I hear things people say about you and it makes me just so angry. People at this school aren’t worth your time.” 

You don’t have it in you to bring up that you both know people say things about the both of you. Shit, about both of you at once, sometimes involving Kotku too. “I am here now,” you told her. “I am never gone for long, am I?” That was true.)

You and Gavin kiss each other a little on the floor, and then a little more than that but not too much. The joint has made him kind of tired. The record he’s playing is on its second play. _Therefore I did not know that I would grow to be my mother’s evil seed and do these evil deeds._ He’s a junior and he has light blond hair and is kind of muscled and has his own car, or at least, he drives a car to school, with the top down.

“So you’re from Russia?” he asks.

“Is very complicated,” you wave your hands in the air, laughing, the lit joint looking like a shooting star. “Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Australia, everywhere in fucking world practically.”

“Man,” he says. “Are your family doctors without borders or something?” You laugh, long and ferocious at that.

“Shit!” you say, trying to stop laughing. “I am sorry. Not trying to make fun of you. Just, is _far_ from what my father does.”

“Sorry,” he says. “My dad had a hard time finding a job after he was laid off. I don’t mean to be a downer. We’re having _fun_ ,” he says, and as Theo would say, _wow,_ because he really is completely stoned.

You laugh a little more, less out of control. It’s fine. You’re just a girl “letting loose” (a phrase you learned from Xandra) and having a relaxed day, smoking and records and just hanging out, with a guy who doesn’t love you but isn’t hurting you either. There’s nothing wrong with this. Maybe people don’t like that you do the same things with a lot of other guys too, maybe some of you don’t even like that you’re doing this one time, because it’s not going anywhere, because whatever you do is bad. But if you didn’t they’d probably say the same, and they’d say other things too, and not just about you, although maybe they’ll still say them anyway. You don’t want anyone to feel bad. You don’t want anyone to hate you or say things about you, or Theo, even true things, you want people to mind their own business. 

“I like the music,” you tell him.

“Yeah…” he says, exhaling as you pass him the joint, his other hand on your hipbone, playing around with the belt loop on your jeans. “You’re really chill,” he tells you, sounding surprised. He must hear a lot about you.

“So are you,” you say thoughtfully. Boys here are not always so calm. Although maybe it’s the weed. You lie down there and listen to the music until Gavin says his parents will be home soon.

“Yeah,” you say, “I have to go home soon too. But, see you around, hey. This was good.” You smile at him. The music is still playing. On his wall is some kind of school team banner. He is from another world, and you didn’t show him what your world is or make him understand even when he asked, you just briefly entered his. This is not good or bad. This is just what it is.

You walk down the staircase, followed by pictures on the wall of Gavin’s family, and the walk back to Theodora’s house is not the longest you’ve ever had to walk.

_

One night you’re watching TV together, Dr. No playing. The commercial break comes and it’s one of those weird, serious commercials, almost silent, ambient music and ocean waves on the screen. You realize Theodora is staring at you and she’s started to stand up. Intense, fixed gaze. Like she’s waiting for you to say something. She almost looks like one of the paintings she’s shown you before in all the times she’s pulled up images online in the school computer lab, or pointed out in textbooks when you bother to look at the homework. The woman in the painting (you think it was something like, “Study for the Lady of Shallott,” not the finished version?) didn’t look much like Theo. But same position, expression. The woman was standing but bent over and staring upwards, though her head was bent, looking like she was about to say something that would be just as irreversible and full of consequences as stepping out of the canvas.

You move closer, almost ready to touch her hands, her face. She speaks and the sound of her words is the way you feel sometimes when you put all your energy to listening and realize your surroundings are silent completely- like being transported into some other, small and personal and surreal world.

“Slava, I have something I have to show you,” she says, each of the words lasting a whole moment in and of themselves. She doesn’t sound afraid. Maybe she’s never sounded less afraid. She sounds like she’s asking you to do something with her that she knows you’ll already do.

You start to wonder what it could be- a threatening letter to her father about his debts she intercepted, a gun, an article with new information about the attack. If Mr. Hobie has written her to say Philip’s leg or head or memory have gotten better. If she is asking to be, as they say, intimate with you again. But you honestly have no idea what could make her like this. She looks so still, so settled, like she’s doing something she’s been ready to do forever.

She begins to walk, and you watch her, the sound of the television growing fainter and fainter, soon, the only sounds: her light steps scuffing and dragging on the carpeted staircase, her hand, grasping the banister, sliding against the wood like the sound of a soft rain outside your window. The warm golden color of the light bulbs shining on her black hair as, her back to you, she walks into the shadowed dark of the second floor, and you, at the bottom of the stairs, waiting. 

_

_11/15:_

_Dear Mom, I’m always so busy lately. I’ve still written in this journal more diligently than doing my homework, even if it’s just to scribble a sentence a day. But the long weekend is coming so maybe I’ll try and catch up then. November’s all right because we get two long weekends, just like in New York, some things are the same here too. Hopefully Dad and Xandra will go to a hotel again and I won’t be expected to celebrate with them and I can just hang out, sleep in, try and finish my English paper. Slava mentioned going to the mall on the break but Kotku said, “in America we have this deranged thing called Black Friday the day after Thanksgiving where the malls and stores are all crowded with people and they line up down the street and sometimes fight each other and push the cashier and trample each other for like a toaster or some dumb shit. You’d hate it and spend the whole time ranting about consumerism. Theo baby, I see you laughing, you’re with me on this one.” A good weekend to just stay inside and do nothing. Maybe stock up on food beforehand, that’s a good idea. Whatever. I guess I’ve learned to take every day as it comes because no matter what you plan something can always happen. That’s why I always make sure the painting is right where I left it every day. I don’t know what to do with it, but I’ll have to figure out something- it must mean something, that it was your favorite, and I saved it, and Welty told me to. I know I haven’t done right, but it wasn’t wrong for me to save it, was it? Right and wrong confuse me now. Every day I find another way that I think I’m lost without you._

_I think you’d really like Popchyk, which is what we call Popper, he’s so cute and fun. You can just carry him everywhere, he’s so small. Remember the little girl puppy we rescued? I just don’t want you to think I’m forgetting anything. Dad and Xandra are fighting again, I don’t know how Slava is sleeping through all this. He stole from her, I guess. Xandra, I mean. I’m not surprised at all. I kind of wanted to believe he was doing better but he isn’t. I’m going to write a lot more about that later. But I’m tired now. I probably won’t be able to get to sleep for a while, though. Good night, love you._

_

You always remember the last good day, the day before it happened. The day it happened might have been good, if not for how it ended. So the last day was the one before.

The last day you were both together, the last day before it happened, you barely left the house. It was one of the last few days before school let out for the break. You woke up in the bed as the sun rose, not sure how you woke up, forgetting your dream as soon as you left it behind. Next to you, you saw Theodora was awake already, staring at the ceiling. “You’re awake,” she said, lowering her voice, turning her head to look at you.

You shrugged, sitting up. “Look out there,” you said. “Like fire. Like the end of the world. Beautiful.”

She looked at the sun rising in silence for a few seconds. “Just a few minutes ago I could see the stars,” she said. “And it happened so fast now. I could never see them in New York. My mom would always tell me about how she could see different constellations and stuff out of the city. But now I can. I would always think about how they’re there, but sometimes you can’t see them in the day or in certain places.” The city that never sleeps, you thought. But most places don’t sleep, not in your experiences. It’s just the people that do. Maybe that’s what the expression means. Maybe what they mean to say is that it never is really night in New York the way it is in other places. You didn’t know. You’d never been. You felt like between the two of you, you invented night.

“Hidden, but still there,” you said. You felt so close to her in that moment, like you were beginning to understand each other’s minds even better than before, and you felt uneasy, because you knew one day you’d have to fix what you’d done and you would have to tell her sometime, even if you did it without her finding out about it. You would have to be honest one day. You couldn’t say why you took it but you think it had to be the same reason why she showed it to you in the first place. When she showed you, you felt like she was telling you her last secret, or at least, what she saw as her last secret. That once she showed you, there was nothing separating the two of you. But if that was what she did, you undid it, by your theft, and the secret of it.

She propped herself up on her elbows. “Kind of like us,” she said, leaning her head back. The sun cast light through the window onto the both of you and the sky blazed like a watercolor painting on acid.

“Yeah,” you said, “a lot like us.” The archer and crab constellation, invisible to the world in the day, but stars in the night, untouchable, free in the sky. You grabbed the covers and pulled them up above both of you as she tried to laugh as quietly as she could.

Her eyes closed, like she was still a little tired. “When we go out,” she said, “it will be a whole new day. Everything will be the same all over. But then the night will come again.” You weren’t sure whether she was sad or just being thoughtful. As soon as that, she opened her eyes. 

“Come on,” she said, “we should probably wake up.”

You laughed, pulling down the sheets. “We are awake.”

She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. If we fall back asleep we’ll be asleep all day. We should get up.”

“All right,” you told her. “Good morning, Theodora. Another time we can sleep all day. Sometimes it is best to be awake all day.”

She looked at you for a long time, and in the quiet, where the pale walls were almost the same color as the rising sun’s colors, you both looked at each other for a moment. “Yeah. Maybe it doesn’t feel better but it is,” she said, and you went to pick your socks off the ground, and Theo held Popchyk, still asleep in her arms as she stayed in bed for one last minute before walking out, toward her bureau to get dressed.

Sometimes it didn’t feel good for the whole day, but it felt good for enough of it to be a good day.


	3. The Black Swan

III: The Black Swan

_“The entrée of Rothbart and Odile was choreographed as a virtuoso dynamic dance which immediately added a mysterious infernal note to the action. The dance was the beginning of witchcraft, the stage lights dimmed into semi-darkness, the curtain emblazoned with armorial bearings descended to the floor, and Odile stopped in front of it in the stage center and was immediately surrounded by black swans.”-_ The Official Bolshoi Ballet Book of Swan Lake, Yuri Grigorovich

_12/15:_

_I know I haven’t written anything for a long time but a lot has happened. Why the hell is it so much colder in New York than when I remember? Am I just remembering wrong or did everything change while I was gone? Or have I just forgotten?_

_I’ve been living with Hobie. I have a feeling that no matter what Mr. Bracegirdle says, this is how it’s going to be. Neither of us are going to listen to him and I don’t think he wants it to come down to a court battle- it had better not, I hope. I don’t know if we’d win. Hobie took me in, I almost didn’t believe it at first. I wish Philip could live here because it used to be his home, and would still be if not for his aunt. I don’t tell that to Hobie. I know why Philip’s aunt is doing this and I don’t know if Hobie wants to talk about it with me. I wish none of us had to lose our homes. I didn’t tell him that but I think he thought the same, when we were all staying together around the time I got back._

_I’m almost impressed with myself for getting back alone. I get the feeling everyone thinks I’m this trainwreck or a pathetic shrinking violet afraid of my own shadow. But I rode buses cross-country over a course of a few days while extremely ill and managed to get myself and Popchyk to Hobie’s shop safely. (If I had been thrown off the bus because of Popchyk I don’t know what I would have done, because there’s no way I would ever hitchhike.) Maybe it’s because when I was on the road I kept thinking about how my mother traveled so much too and maybe went through the same places. I was afraid a lot but also, I was kind of too sick and tired to focus on that for a lot of the ride, until I got back to New York, then I was so nervous. But maybe returning to New York was what made me nervous. Leaving, and going back._

_I haven’t heard from Slava in so long. She texted me from someone else’s phone that she was at a party at the MGM Grand and she’d text me back soon and she never did. I’m not sure whether or not to believe her about where she was- either way I feel worried. She wouldn’t just not ever contact me again. Not after everything. And she didn’t have to kiss me. I think she meant it. I keep hoping she’ll call one day like nothing happened and I’ll say how worried I was and she’ll reassure me and tell me I worry too much for my own good. But that would have probably happened by now. We spent every day together. We never went a day without talking. I’ve told Hobie about her but he doesn’t need to know some things. I don’t want to bring even more death and morbidity into his house; that’s why I don’t often talk about a lot of more serious things to him. Also because sometimes I don’t know what to say. He never pressures me like other adults have done. I know I’ll have to go back to school sometime, but that isn’t happening yet. Hobie has been showing me a lot of furniture work and teaching me how to do it and I’m really grateful and I really like helping._

_Sometimes I wonder if Dad did it on purpose. If he didn’t I wonder if he realized what was happening._

_I left most of my stuff at Xandra’s house after I left. So I went to buy new clothes because I didn’t have any with me when I came, and I also got my teeth fixed because I didn’t take care of them at all, and things like that. But I made sure to bring the painting. The only one who knows is Popchyk – he was in my bag with it, and he can’t tell anyone. I don’t know what I’m going to do._

_Do I ever know what I’m going to do? Even the other week when I bought a winter coat to suit how fucking cold it is here it turned out that it wasn’t just floor length, I was too short for it and I had to sew the hem so I would be able to walk around in it._

_Christmas is coming. I think Hobie and I are both kind of sad but also kind of happy because we’re not really alone for it._

___

Whenever you look back, you try not to remember the first month. The first month after Theo’s dad died in a car crash and she left immediately because they would have put her in a foster home, she said, she couldn’t even wait overnight no matter what you told her, and you could have told her about the painting but you didn’t. You tried, at least. But you didn't. All that month you try to forget, and afterwards you try to forget that month. But you don’t forget. Laughing uncontrollably as your nose bled down to your chest and the guys would pull away from you and stop kissing or dancing but you barely noticed them stopping or your blood, salty on your tongue like when you went underwater in Papua New Guinea, the seawater making its way into your mouth. Waking up on pavement, in the middle of some parking lot in the middle of nowhere, thinking of how in a way your places reversed. Lying down with your veins full and sparkling, in the middle of some party, _she’s not dead is she_? asked like music in another room as you let it all go through you and don’t bother to answer. Riding around the Strip in some classmate’s father’s convertible surrounded by people you didn’t know, place of honor in the passenger seat, undoing your seatbelt and leaning forward over the door, wanting to see everything, reaching out your arms and standing, long after they tell you to stop, it isn’t safe to do that. Crying the first night, all night, until your head hurts like the time your father pushed you and your head hit the tile floor. Spending all day sitting alone at the abandoned playground the next day, watching the sun change positions as the hours go by. The last week, right before you went back to Xandra, waking up in Kotku’s bathroom, her mom calling the ambulance, the hospital like an interrogation room, like a bad trip. What’s her name, the nurse asked Kotku’s mom, but you answered, you were afraid they’d get in trouble because of you- if their names were given to the doctors, who knows if the doctors would decide Ms. Hutchins was a criminal and Kotku pushed the drugs on you. (When the withdrawal really hit you started begging a nurse’s assistant, _please don’t arrest Ms. Hutchins or Kotku,_ but you must have been speaking another language, because all she did was look to the doctor and ask if they should get a translator.)

You knew you did not mean to do it. Even if there was no reason for you to really keep going on, you didn’t mean to do it, because that’s not who you are. The nurses and doctors and social workers might be right about you in some ways, but you didn’t try to die.

The pillow was cold against your back, exposed by the hospital gown, which had a strange pattern of mauve and pale blue and mint green, all muted like they didn’t want to be seen. You were full of Narcan and some other stuff you didn’t know. Ms. Hutchins was biting her lip and Kotku’s formerly black-polished nails were almost plain from how much she’d been biting them. You wanted to say _I am fine, Ms. H, may I come back home with you and Kotku tonight?_ But your limbs felt like lead and you knew if you tried to leave it would just be worse for you.

You looked the nurse in the eye and said your name was Bohuslava Volodymyrivna Pavlikovskaya. 

_

On the last day in the hospital, you don’t feel so sick anymore, and you figure that once you leave the people at the hospital can’t do much to you anymore. Ms. Hutchins has had to work a lot but she visited you every day and Kotku is there all the time too.

She walks up to your bed. You don’t remember, years later, what she was wearing or what they made you eat at the hospital that day and you forget which nurse you had but you remember it was a Tuesday. “Hey,” she says, her voice sounding quiet. Her eyes look like she’d been crying. When she grips your hands in hers you can feel the warm plastic of her Hot Topic bracelets and it feels like the warmest thing you’ve felt since you were admitted.

“I am not angry your mom called the hospital,” you tell her. “And if you had not been there I would be dead, I know. I am not angry at either of you. I want you to know this.”

She gives you a sad smile. “It was at my place. Of course I was there.” A pause. “I’m glad you didn’t die,” she says, inhaling deeply, like it’s hard for her to figure out what to say, but then again, you’re not sure if you’d know what to say. She swallows like the way she does when she’s sad.

“I did not mean to do it,” you tell her, looking down at your lap, covered by the white hospital blankets, the color of printer paper in the school computer lab. Nothing like the bright red comforter in Theo’s room that would always keep the two of you warm even when the air conditioning felt like late October in Ukraine. “I was not trying to kill myself, Kotku.”

She nods, her eyes like a clear swimming pool, all wet and neon. “I know, Slava,” she tells you. “Listen,” she says, “sometime before the break…” you had forgotten winter break was coming soon, “I’m starting at a new school. My mom and I are moving. We had a little money saved and she wants both of us to try and start over in Wyoming.”

Under different circumstances you would have tried to make a joke- _start over doing what, being cowgirls?_

There’s a quiet moment. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do or anything. I just want you to have an okay life because you’re my friend and I care about you and I know in life we all have to go through some shit if we want to be able to deal with being alive but I don’t want you to put yourself through shit that you don’t need to live through. I want you to survive, Slava. That’s what I realized when I first became your friend, I knew you were a real survivor. I don’t want you to give up.”

You can feel your nose running, your eyes stinging, you sniffle a little more than you thought you would. “I am not giving up,” you tell her. “How do you feel about going to Wyoming?”

“Sometimes,” she tells you, “things don’t last forever whether we want them to or not. But they can’t and that’s that.”

“They will never know what hit them there, soldat,” you tell her, smiling a little, sniffling a little also, “like when I came to Vegas.”

She smiles. “Yeah, sestra,” she says, her American accent somehow working with the Russian, and the two of you embrace, her sitting down on your bed, the two of you holding each other’s hands like one big fist together. “Promise me you’ll never stop being like that wherever you go. You’ll never let anything get you down.”

You aren’t good with promises. “I will try,” you say, and the both of you look at each other. 

She smiles a little. “I believe you,” she says, and the two of you listen to her Walkman for a while, sprawled out on the bed, staring at the ceiling, like it’s the sky and you’re waiting for the sunset.

_

As of the first week back, you’ve been making good money at school, you’re fairly certain. It’s like nothing ever happened, it’s like the whole past month was a blackout. Maybe sometimes you’ve treated whole times that way, if they weren’t good, they’re in the past and you want to be happy. But you’re not happy and you know that.

The thing is, you’ve never actually _made_ money of your own. You’ve stolen things, you’ve lived off of your father’s support when he remembers to provide for you, you’ve even allowed people to give to you. But that isn’t money. It’s not classmates, younger and older and your age, giving you bills until you can’t fit them into your deep jacket pockets. It’s not seeing these pieces of paper with the faces of American men you hardly know anything about on them, staring back at you, gravely respectful- _you got this by your own actions_. You wonder if it’s how adults feel, this sort of surprise. Theo’s father would always talk about _luck_ or _fortune_. This is not that, but in spite of those things.

You are at the house waiting for Xandra to come back from work. She knows what you’ve been up to and you’ve promised for the sake of the both of you that you’ll do everything you can- frankly, those “friends” of hers scare you a little too. Mr. Silver seems all right, but the couple she’s in debt to, you wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to take the both of you out if they came by one night and there was no money. 

You’re sitting on the couch, watching TV while eating some barbecue chips, when you hear the door open. “Fuck,” says Xandra, “what a shitty fucking day at work. I’m telling you,” she sounds worn out. She’s forgiven you, she forgave you quick enough. One night you asked her why you let her in and she told you, what the hell, kid, you were alone and so fucked up that night you could have ended up in the bottom of a ditch by the next day, just because I didn’t always get along with you girls doesn’t mean I want all that for you. But that doesn’t explain why she forgave you. Maybe it’s because she sees you for who you are, and she thinks you can’t help it, it’s just your nature. Maybe forgiving you is easier than forgiving Larry. “If we don’t-”

“Xandra,” you say, a little unsure, holding the old shopping bag from Macy’s that has all the money in it, “this is what I made this week…” you extend one of your hands. “Maybe this is enough?” You aren’t sure exactly how much debt needs to be paid, but you know it’s significant. She walks over to you, runway-quick, and gasps the moment she looks in the bag. She reaches her hands in, counting, until she isn’t and she’s looking you, shocked, directly in your eyes.

“You made all of this?” You nod, wondering what she’s trying to tell you. She seems stunned for a moment until she grabs you by the shoulders and her eyes take on a bit of a manic glint. She laughs a little. “Kid, this is multiple times over the amount of money they asked for. We could fucking buy them!” she tells you and takes a few stacks and throws them in the air and clasps her arms around you in an embrace, “we’re going to be okay!” So you start laughing then, the way you used to laugh when you were out of sight of the mall cops or Popchyk would bite a piece of furniture, and you throw your head back and raise the bag and overturn it all as the money falls like leaves in a tropical storm in a place you will never go back to because you only ever go forward, and you have come a very long way and Xandra asks if you’re all right because she’s long past stopped laughing by now and all you can do is nod your head. You think you have just become an adult.

_

_3/13:_

_Sometimes Ethan asks me what I think about when I zone out the way I do. It sounds more like a rhetorical question, or like he’s asking me why I zone out, not what I’m thinking about. Ethan is I guess my boyfriend. He’s a lot older, like, late twenties older- he knows I’m in high school and everything. I remember Kotku had an older boyfriend who she always wanted to get away from and was afraid of. I’m kind of afraid of him sometimes. But we don’t really know each other too well, we’re not a real boyfriend and girlfriend like other people would be. You’re not as innocent as you seem, he said once, as if it was something he discovered, but he isn’t the first person to think that, and I don’t think he’s telling me anything new. I don’t really like being around him. Even though I think I guess I have a lot to learn from being around him. It’s not going to last because he has a real girlfriend who will be back soon. Then maybe I’ll find a real boyfriend. If Philip came back…_

_I miss Slava. I search her online but of course nothing ever comes up. And I’m assuming there aren’t many people in the world who have her exact name so if I did google her and find something, it would have to be her. I guess I expected not to find anything but I had to check._

_Sometimes I look up Jane Does in places she might have been. Nevada, the rest of the Southwest. Texas, even Alaska. They always have off details – a girl in the Mojave Desert had Ukrainian ancestry according to the forensics people and was sixteen years old but her facial reconstruction showed she was blonde, a girl in Juneau had all these similar physical characteristics but died in 2000, a girl in the Grand Canyon’s remains was in such bad shape there was no facial reconstruction and she died in late 2006 but her skeleton was too short. I know none of them are her and none of them will be her. If something ever happened to her I think she’d be lost forever. I keep looking them up though. I think those girls are like us. Maybe we could have been them too, if we hadn’t been together other to look out for each other. Or maybe we’re just lucky our time didn’t come in that exact way at that point in time. I hope one day I can find her again, and she’s alive. If she died I don’t know who aside from me would really remember her. I tell Hobie about her a lot. I don’t tell him a lot of things, but some things, we can talk about for hours. I really feel at home here. It’s not home, nothing will ever be like being home with my mother again, but I feel better here than anywhere else I go._

_Hobie asked me if my homework was getting stressful for me it would be all right if I took a break. Hobie doesn’t check my grades- I don’t study that hard. I think when Ethan’s girlfriend comes back I’ll be home more which will probably be good because I think Hobie’s got a lot of stressful work with the shop. I like it there, it’s much better than school. I hope he lets me work there for real when I’m done with school. I think he might want me to but hasn’t asked yet, he isn’t always direct about things. Neither am I. I guess we try. I think my mother would have been good friends with him. I wish she could have known him. If it hadn’t been for the attack maybe we all could have known each other. If it hadn’t been for the attack I wouldn’t be the Attack Girl at my school and there would be one less thing separating me from the rest of the world while making me some kind of exhibition in it. I think a lot about what could have been if not for the attack but I don’t really tell that to anyone because I don’t really talk to many people aside from Hobie and Philip, and most of the time I talk to Philip it’s over the phone or online and how do you even email or text about something like that, and Hobie, I definitely don’t want to bring it up with him, especially because he doesn’t really bring it up with me, so I think we’ve both decided it’s for the better. I know Philip hates his school like I do. Maybe we’re both happier out of school and once we get older things might be better just by a little._

_In a few days it’s St. Patrick’s Day…I’ve gotten a few party invitations from guys at school…I guess it’s better than staying in alone._

_

You’ve gone to the doctors, who checked you out for any problems (something called black mold sickness, they tell you it can be helped) and gave you some shots; and paid someone to get you false identification; and bought yourself some new clothes. And one day you have made so much you don’t feel right imposing on Xandra anymore, and you want to be on your own, anyway. In a way you’ve always been on your own- now you don’t have to rely on others anymore so much.

Maybe you shouldn’t rely on anyone. You can’t afford to. But you have to rely on yourself, and your father didn’t. You think sometimes he relied on you.

So the night before you leave, Xandra says you’ll have a “girls’ night”. She’s reading off Tarot cards to you.

“You know,” she says, staring you down across the table like a blackjack dealer, “when I was around your age I was obsessed with this guy.” You nod, you always enjoy her crazy stories. _I never did half the crazy things you girls did_ , she’ll say every time but you still enjoy hearing about it, the things from Xandra’s youth that are like something out of a television program. “And I would have gone anywhere with him. Spent my life with him. I didn’t go to college because of him even though I wanted to. But then he left me.” You think you know what she’s trying to say, because she’s always known. It wasn’t like there was a way she could have not seen. And she did see, and, undoubtedly, heard things as well. 

“She wasn’t like that,” you tell her. “You know.” But, then, maybe Xandra is thinking her self of the past was more like Theo- giving up too much to you, who never deserved it. Not that Xandra would know the half of it.

Xandra pauses for a moment. “No,” she says, “I guess. But I mean, you. You haven’t been the same since. Maybe neither of us have.” You suppose that is true as well. “Sometimes I just- all I feel is mad. He never told me a goddamn thing. _Larry, you never told me you had a kid. Larry, you never told me you were that much in debt. Larry, you never told me you were planning to leave town_.” Xandra sounds more sad than angry and you don’t know what to say. You never feel angry at Theo. You wonder what she felt, when she knew what you did. If she wasn’t even surprised. After all, she knew you better than anyone else ever did. “You have to think about the future,” she says, and reaches out the cards. “And I don’t mean just this way.”

You suppose you’ve been thinking about the future- that’s why you’re choosing to leave. Her and Mr. Silver and this far edge of Las Vegas. Whenever you’ve left in the past it’s never been a choice. Not much has, you realize. But maybe sometimes, leaving is necessary, and the best thing to do, and staying will only make things worse. You think Xandra understands that- that’s why she’s been talking about going to Reno. “It’s a ghost town here,” she had said, calling to mind the Old West they taught you about in school, towns completely abandoned when the gold was gone. The town for ghosts, or the town is a ghost itself. Either way is true, you think.

“Thank you,” you say earnestly.

“Yeah, kid,” Xandra says a bit wearily, “you too.”

_

The night you threaten to kill Blake is the night you know you have to leave Vegas or you’ll die here, today or tomorrow or in five years. It’s the night you know you’re stuck here and if you don’t leave now you’ll end up worse off than your father.

You always get ahead of yourself when you think about things. That, or you take a while to get to the point. That’s how time works for you though. So fast, and all at once, like some kind of Ferris wheel, just rolling and spinning, up and down, so that your memories are always flashing to you regardless of when they’re from.

You’d gotten yourself a cool flat on the Strip. You didn’t live with Blake. This is something you’ll insist to yourself you never did, even when you stayed night after night at his house, stayed for days in a cloud of intoxication, not even caring because you were making money, not even caring because you just had lost the part of you that cared. You never lived off him. He dealt, kind of like you. You made more, and better deals, and were better liked, and he didn’t like that. You “worked together,” so to speak, but weren’t partners, and neither of you worked for the other. And sometimes you did a lot more than just work, although he likely wouldn’t have called you his girlfriend. There were probably a lot more girls. You hope your later actions didn’t make him angrier at them. Sometimes he would hit you and you would hit back and sometimes it would go on for a while and then it would end and be forgotten like it didn’t matter even though you were always giving everything you had to be able to halfway defend yourself. You could take it, you told yourself, you were used to it.

“Fuckin’ crazy Russian,” Blake once said, in a good mood, his face in a cloud of weed-smoke as he lay back on his couch, his blond hair stark against the black leather couch. “I have never met any girl like you. Probably never will again.” A lot of men are like you, but far worse than even you can imagine, you didn’t tell him.

“Nyet,” you told him, half asleep, “I have been all over this city”- because by then it was true, and you really _had_ partied in the MGM Grand so many times but what did it matter if you were basically alone, and you knew all about the Strip and knew all the clubs and casinos and hotels inside out, “all over the world…And I can attest,” and he laughed again because you talked so crazy and weird but it was still kind of sexy. Even though neither of you ever really _talked_ with each other.

Which brings you to the night he thought you stole from him. Of course, you are in fact a thief, so you would understand him not believing when you told him he was wrong, you would have understood him being angry and even less likely to believe you when you told him, _oh fuck you Blake, why the fuck would I steal from you when I do not need to_? You weren’t surprised when all that devolved into him hitting you.

He didn’t stop, no matter what you did. It was like some of the worst times with your dad when he would just lose it, like he was possessed or something. At one point it was too much for you and he knocked you down to the ground and began hitting your head against the floor and you remembered at that point to cover your head so he just ended up kicking your arms and then your chest and stomach and screaming at you things you only half-understood, something about how he knows you’re a liar, and who in this town isn’t but you even are lying about your name and he’s never seen where you live and how many people are you stealing from just like him? And after a while he got tired of it because you were just lying there, and he’d worked himself up, so fast and wild.

You didn’t scream or cry. You’d thrown up and you almost smiled thinking about well, who’s going to clean it? How long you were lying there, you don’t know, you couldn’t get up. Not even your father had this kind of force in him. In the other room you knew Blake was laying down, resting it all off- the fury, and whatever was in his system.

When you could, you dragged yourself over to the cabinet under the sink. Screwdriver and soap and Windex and hidden stacks of cash, some nails, a hammer. You took it, like it had been waiting for you, like your touch on its metal would immediately enact something. It took a minute to get up and your vision went a little off at first but you walked, slowly and gritting your teeth with the pain, but you found his doorway.

He was asleep and waking up at the sound of your footsteps, or he’d been half asleep. You looked him dead in the eye and with no expression in your voice, the hammer hanging from your hand limp as a gardener carrying a weed, “I killed someone. I killed a man and that is why I use false information. Had to leave Alaska. I had been hitchhiking.” He was silent, staring at you like he was seeing you for the first time; you think he nodded, just a little. “I killed him with pipe iron just like this thing. He is big and I am small. But I got him over the head and from then I, you know,” you gestured towards yourself, and went to sit down in the chair near his bed, a piece of furniture you don’t know anything about other than that its seat is quilted leather. You leaned forward, and held the hammer close over your knees. “I know you never killed anyone. Let me tell you. Even when you make the wound fatal enough it can still take a long time.” You looked away for a moment, out the window. You can see a rainbow of lights, hear the cars, sounds of people shouting. The world is so big, you think- entire lifetimes go on in one small room, in the middle of big cities, how many times over? Even in the smallest towns in the world. You looked back at him then.

“I do not ever want to do it again,” you said, feeling like you really did do it already, what you said you did and what you were threatening to do, like it was the only thing you’ve been doing all your life and you’re ready for it to be over.

You knew, then, no matter what he did, or tried to, you’d walk out of his place and never see him again. You’d had your share of taking beatings like medicine you have to swallow, you were sick of the blow always around you like dust in an unkempt house, you were sick of it all. You overstayed your welcome in this place and it betrayed you. _You should have known, Slava, you were meant to run,_ you imagined Vegas saying, a great voice from the sphinx on the Strip, from the sky above the abandoned Desert End streets.

“Jesus Christ,” Blake said, too stunned, too under the influence to do anything else. You knew where he kept his gun, very flashy about it. He didn’t have one hidden in there. “Holy shit.” You could have done it. In the moment you thought that. When you told him, when you said you never wanted to do it again, and when you first saw the hammer in the cabinet.

“Do not ever look for me,” you said, not sounding like your father, or anyone you knew. Just you, in a tone you were not sure if you’d ever used before, even in your dealings.

This is what happened. This is why you are walking through the Strip with your face bruised and blood around your mouth, walking fast like someone is maybe after you but you’re not sure exactly, or like you have somewhere to get to immediately. Some people look you over but no one stops you or asks about it. When you get to your flat you find yourself running up the stairs rather than taking the elevator and your hand is shaking so much you just take your whole boot off instead of reaching in it for the key, and you blur through the place, taking some money and some clothes and some false documents (and of course, the painting, because you’re all alone, and it is too, and you’ve gone too far to not know leaving it here is dangerous), not even looking too closely at which papers, and when you find a bag of blow you open it and let it all go down the sink with the faucet on, staring at it, like it had to be done. The wet remnants cling to the sink like sugar grains after you brush your teeth, spit out. Because right now you think you are done, you think you have been even worse lately, even more fucked up than that first month, that first month after, when you were still in high school. You need to be done or it will kill you and it will be a long time before that but it will happen.

You don’t want any questions when you go. So when you feel like your hands are steadier, you wash your face and put on a clean shirt and use cover-up for the bruises. ( _Ah what the fuck Princess? Why would spraying perfume on a cut help me? You think it makes me more pretty or something?_ ) There is no one, you think, you need to settle anything with or say goodbye to.

You take a cab to the nearest bus station. You don’t see any times tonight for California, but that’s fine. Maybe further is good. Maybe a few bus trips are in order. You remember a decrepit bus in Alaska, pulling away from the airport upon arrival, your father gesturing you to look out the window: “See. How much there is,” he said to you, “there is so much of the world.”

Greyhound, says the grey letters of the building, the logo of the dog in red, white, and blue. Racing through this country. You step forward, ready to do what he does.

_

_7/20:_

_Yet another year older. These years are just blurring by me. How many years has it been since the attack? How many years has it been since I left Las Vegas? How many years since I returned to New York? A hundred years in one second. Memento mori. Today is my birthday and I can’t enjoy it at all. I never can anymore. (I remember when my dad would tell us all about our star charts Slava laughed so much because she thought it was funny that my sign was “the crab”. What kind of star is that, she would laugh. She was a Sagittarius. Is. Is, I mean…) But Hobie ordered red velvet cake so we’re having a nice dinner at home anyway. I don’t want to show how sad I am, I feel like that would be rather disappointing to him. It’s all right- I’m used to pretending to be different, happier. Other people like it._

_I just feel old. It’s a new decade this year, I keep thinking about that. A few years ago, the idea of this year seemed like something out of a science fiction novel. Philip will be visiting soon so I’ll have to figure out what to wear on the days he’ll be here and what to talk about and I hope he doesn’t have a girlfriend but he probably doesn’t because whenever we talk, in person or in emails or texts, he never mentions going out with girls or dating or anything like that. I think maybe he’s the sort of guy who doesn’t play around with girls, he’s respectful – but he’s like me, he has to find the right person to get close to. So maybe one day he’ll realize we’re so similar. When we talk he recommends books and movies and music and things like that and we talk about Hobie and school but never really about any of the bad things. Once he told me I had artistic taste in clothes and I’m still trying to figure out what that means._

_Since Hobie and I were celebrating I went to those pet stores to buy Popchyk one of those dog cookies. I brought him in my bag. I know it’s considered kind of tabloid celebrity-ish to do that (I think that was why I thought I was cool for doing it back in high school) but he likes to be carried around, and he fits, and I think he feels safe and might like being close to eye level with people._

_Sometimes I feel like this city isn’t the place I knew. Like when you used to know someone and you meet them again and so much time has passed and you’re both new people. Maybe it’s like that for a lot of people. Hobie always talks about how he isn’t getting business like he used to since the recession and hasn’t been for a while and antiques aren’t what they used to be and he can’t keep the store open as often if no one is going to come in, and I know he gets these letters from the IRS. I don’t want him to lose the shop because then he probably will lose his home too. And I don’t know where that leaves me, I’m too old for Child Non-Protecting Services now but still. I feel like if it comes down to him losing everything, it can’t happen. I have to do something to help. I don’t know what but I will._

_

There is so much of the world- so much of America, more than you ever knew. You had enough money to go to Florida, which always seemed interesting from how Xandra talked about it. And it was far away. So you went the one-way trip, and left Route 66 in the past, left the town with the ghosts.

In Miami, after the trip and getting a small hotel room you intend to at least for now pay a weekly rent for- you think of Kotku and her mother and wonder if they’re all right, wherever they are, if it’s better for them – you have an amount of money, but not an extravagant amount. And, for now at least, would like to make your money legally, even though you’re using falsified identification (“Mirjana Danilović,” though you say, “just call me Mira”). And you want to stay clean because you don’t want to die and you know the reasons why you did it all and you know you cannot go back and change what you’ve done and all you have is now.

So during the day you work in a tourist shop, one of those big stores that so many coastal towns have in this country, with t-shirts and sandals and magnets and all kinds of little things with bright colors and sharks and dolphins and palm trees that say MIAMI and FLORIDA. The store is big, and tourist season lasts long if you include the off-peak and shoulder season, so there’s always something to organize or put on the floor, people to ring up. People from all over the country, the world. You hope you never meet anyone who actually expects you to know anything about living in Serbia, and you should have thought more about which of your fake IDs to bring along, but then, there are a lot of Serbs in Alaska and you know Alaska and can always claim to have lived abroad most of your life, in Europe then Alaska, then Vegas, then here. Actually- that’s a good enough idea that you’ll go with that from here on. There are locals, sometimes. But mostly tourists are the people who come in here. You always try and figure out what language they’re speaking, if it’s not English, even if you don’t know what it is. Some of them come for school breaks, wearing high school sports team shirts. They seem so young. You don’t know if you ever looked that young. You don’t know how old people think you are when they see you.

At night you dance at the Starlight Gentlemen’s Club. It’s funny, Theodora once told you she was pretty sure you hated men. You don’t think you hate anyone. Some of the men you certainly don’t like – your boss Alex is truly unpleasant, but you bring in patrons so he has to respect that- but some of the guys you dance for are all right. You think maybe now that you’re an adult, less starved and cornered, freer and more confident and grown, the person you really are, for better or worse, is more visible, and that person is someone maybe a lot of guys see themselves in. You certainly get along with the other girls there. Yoli, a few years older than you, who is always texting the other girls or her other friends or her family members on her phone with flower stickers on it, and showing you all pictures of the dog she adopted; Angela, recently thirty, who jokes about being “old” (and Lara rolls her eyes, amused) who dyes her hair pink and brought all of you home one evening before work to celebrate her birthday where you met her grandfather who only speaks Finnish and who depends so much on Angela now; Lara, thirty-eight, who always wears something green and told you she’s been dancing for twenty years and watched you rehearse before the first few nights to make sure you weren’t about to fall but you didn’t, and she promised she wasn’t trying to make you nervous, just trying to look out for you.

“Do you ever miss home?” Yoli once asks you. She’s lived her whole life in Florida. You can’t imagine a whole life in one place. This city must feel a part of her. 

The possible answers to her question: Yes. No. Depends on which place you are talking about. You miss a place that wasn’t home. You have no home. You try and never look back, but you always do anyway. All of those are answers you could have said, but didn’t, and you look back at Yoli like she’s stared right into you and maybe she did. You try to stop biting your lips because that glossy shit doesn’t come cheap. You spend enough money covering your scars with foundation. Yoli nods at you and Alex yells at you _ladies your shift is about to start!_ “So loud,” you roll your eyes. You and Yoli dance to some of the songs you remember from high school. Your favorites were always the hard rock ones- your long, messy hair is good for headbanging and the guys have always been into that. Yoli, always willing to share her headphones, likes the smooth pop tunes that are so similar to what she listens to while jogging. That always makes you think of the past- listening to a Walkman in Kotku’s room while that song “Runaway Love” plays and she says _this song is about my life;_ every night in Theo’s room, falling asleep to the Velvet Underground, holding her and feeling her heartbeat like it’s the bass of the song. Yoli is always wearing pink body glitter that gets everywhere; she bought you some silver glitter. She tells you not to date any of the customers, and you say you don’t date. She shows you around the city some nights before work, the lights flamingo pink and sea blue against the dark sky, the bridge a shining metallic purple-blue over the water.

You are very popular, soon enough. The heavy metal girl who steals the show. Cold Eastern Europe brought over to hot Miami. Instrumental part of Rammstein’s song “Moskau” playing as you’re introduced, _Next up is Mira, straight from the ruins of Yugoslavia, ready to show you gentlemen she can rock as hard as any American!_ Says Rick the DJ and then some song like “Poison” by Alice Cooper or “Wolf Moon” by Type O Negative plays. All the movement gets you physically stronger, even if you’ll never get much bigger. It’s hard work, but you try your best.

“You said you were from Alaska, I thought?” Yoli asks you one day while you take your cigarette break. “I heard you tell Angela all about Vegas. Did you not like it there?” she asks, curious. “I’ve only ever been for a vacation. It was pretty cool.”

It’s your home if you can’t picture yourself living anywhere else, said someone on the TV once in Theo’s house, some real estate commercial, and Theo sighed miserably and you knew even if she went back to New York that day she’d never have her home again, and Kotku said, if you can’t picture yourself living anywhere else then sometimes that means it’s time to go, and you thought that you could picture yourself anywhere, you couldn’t picture yourself in _one_ place.

You shrug. “I’ve lived everywhere,” you tell her, and after a quiet moment, “I hear you Americans always say that no one should be in Vegas for longer than a few days.” You don’t say any more about it and she doesn’t ask. Vegas _is_ America, Xandra once told you and maybe she was right in a way. And if you should only stay in Vegas for a few days like Theo said, what does that mean for everyone in this country? For the people who live there? What did it mean for both of you?

“Yeah,” she says, looking at you for a moment. “Just needed a new beginning?” You don’t know how to answer so you don’t. She seems to be able to get that you don’t know what to say so she smiles a little and pats your shoulder. “I’m a lot different,” she says, “I can’t imagine leaving. I mean, it’s not for everyone here. But it’s for me. A lot of people don’t like it, and a lot of people come on vacation because it’s really like no other place. And once they come they always come back.” You remember Xandra, years in Vegas, still wearing her work nametag that said FLORIDA right under her name and wonder if she came back here ever. “Maybe it’s a little like Vegas in a way, because it’s so unique. People see the pictures, the TV shows, the tourist places, and it’s famous but there’s so much else people don’t see if they don’t look. I know it isn’t perfect here. But it’s like I _understand_ here best. I’ve never been anywhere I liked as much here, definitely never been anywhere else I actually _loved_ …so I guess that means it’s really _home_. Do you see what I mean?”

You think in a way you do. Sometimes you dream you’re still there, still the ages you were.

“One thing about this city is you meet people from all over. I mean, you know Lara’s from the middle of nowhere, Minnesota, she needed to leave or else she’d be talking to the same twenty people forever,” Yoli continues. You remember isolation in so many places. “We all like you. I just wanted to make sure you knew that because we’re always all together here and everything but sometimes you’re really quiet.”

“I am?” you ask. Now that you think about it, you suppose you were, but then sometimes you are when you’re new. You think of it as being observational but in effect it may not always look that way.

“A little,” Yoli says, “but don’t worry."

“Say, Yoli. My boss at the shop says he is closing down for the holiday. Would you all show me the beach?” She smiles at you.

“You _do_ like it here,” she says triumphantly, and she’s right, you do.

_

“Ah!” you throw up your hands in exasperation, but laugh, because it’s not so bad. There’s a line halfway across the store because it’s a busy, busy day, busier than your manager Daniel expected because it didn’t actually rain today and so tourists aren’t hiding inside resort gyms and malls and movie theaters; they’re going out driving and walking, on their way to the beach and the pool and the golf course, and on their way they’re picking up their sandals and swimsuits and beach umbrellas. _These girls fall like dominoes,_ blasts the radio, the drums of the song like vocal sun rays in the bright noon of the day, and you have to smile.

“You should see this place when it’s really tourist season,” your coworker Michel says. His work t-shirt is a bright sea blue with a picture of a dolphin and the store’s name ( _BEACHSIDE WAVES_ , though you are a drive from the beach, everything here is a considerable drive from everything else and a more considerable walk), while yours is pink like the flamingos that are constantly appearing on merchandise here, though you’ve never seen any in person, with a picture of some seashells.

“I imagine the Vegas Strip but everyone is elderly,” you say. It’s crowded already.

“Right,” he says, “I forgot you lived there. That must have been quite...intense.” Michel is from Miami, but speaks French, his first language. Since he’s lived in America longer than you, he knows some things you don’t about this country, even though he is still in high school.

You laugh. “It was, good God, you have no idea how right you are. I mostly lived on the edge of town though.” This isn’t entirely true, only for the first couple years, but those years were maybe the only true years. “Do you enjoy school? You do not want to be like me. I was not a good student.”

He thinks about it for a moment. “It’s all right. It could be a lot worse. This spring my girlfriend and I are going to Prom so I’m looking forward to it.” You’ve heard him talking on his girlfriend, Elise, over the phone during break time, always the two of them laughing. “I’m not looking forward to all the finals, though.” Well, he seems like he won’t be dealing with the problems you did. A good head on his shoulders. You wonder what you would have done at Prom, if you would have gone to finals your senior year, if you stayed, but if you’d stayed, then that would have meant Theo never left. You hope Michel and Elise always stay together but you don’t tell him that.

“Hm. Well, dealing with some things you don’t like sometimes makes the better things seem even more perfect,” you tell him.

“That’s an…interesting way of thinking about things,” he says, like he thinks it’s a little strange but not necessarily wrong.

A man about fifteen feet away, looking at a display of sandals, yells toward your counter. “Does this store sell live bait?” he asks. You shake your head no as Michel says, “no, but you can try this store down the street, Landry’s.” The moment the man walks out the two of you exchange a glance and laugh, even as you get your scanners ready to take care of the customers that are lining up, always lining up, always something new in your life here.

_

_10/20: Some guy from the campus newspaper walked up to me and asked if I had any “reflections” to share for “the newspaper’s evaluation of the legacy of Columbus Day.” I could have told him I had two hours of sleep last night and can barely keep myself awake let alone contribute to an op-ed, or that I had to immediately get to my Russian class which was in 3 minutes, or that I was just so fucking tired of how everyone looks at me and talks to me and I may as well be chained to a wall on observation and why don’t you reflect on that. Instead I just looked him dead in the eye. “No, I really don’t,” I said slowly, walking away. And that was the truth. I have nothing I want to give any of these people, and I’m not even sure what they want from me half the time anyway. One thing I’ve learned is that when liars tell the truth they tell it clear and plain._

_In college I’m the girl-who-no-one-knows-what-her-deal-is. Sure, people have called me smart, professors have said I’ve had interesting contributions, classmates have called me names, but it’s not like middle school or Vegas Or maybe it’s a little like Vegas- “All Tomorrow’s Parties”, I think about the song a lot, how Nick Cave redid it and made it sound like some rock Inferno. People usually just leave me alone. I don’t really have friends but I sometimes have nice discussions with classmates even about things that aren’t to do with school. I go to parties, usually alone, not as afraid as I was once. Looking back it makes no sense why I was more afraid with Slava than without her. Maybe being alone makes me too sad to be afraid._

_Halloween is coming so Hobie and I are getting our standard holiday customers: people who want to buy some old textile or doily to add to their costume, people with real money who think some candelabra will add to the atmosphere for their party. I barely pay attention to minor holidays anymore. I just remembered the last Halloween in Vegas, Slava and Kotku and I all had black tracksuits so we went as the Charlie’s Angels and Kotku’s mom took a picture of us, but the party at some junior’s house ended at 11 PM because his parents were coming home so we just hung out and watched horror movies on TV barely even paying attention._

_All I do is think about the past. No wonder no one could even come close to me if I wanted it. I’m not like other people._

_I think some of the people looking at the storefront right now are going to come in. Well, if Hobie has done so much for me, then I’m going to try and help him. If I have to invent things for some high society types to do that, then in my experience- they don’t to deal with truth much anyway._

_I don’t know what else to do other than what I’ve been doing. I could have just stood by and let Hobie go bankrupt, maybe even lose his home. Sometimes there are no good options._

_

You’re in the champagne room with Lewis, who comes into the club about once a week, and after you dance he asks you, very gravely, if you know what he noticed first about you. He doesn’t have a lot of money, you could have figured that out long before he told you so the other week, but he always gives you a good tip, and sometimes spends extra for some time in the champagne room. You’re his favorite there. You turn to him, smiling, because he says he wants to tell you something. And so he turns his head a little, pointing to the back of his neck. “I have it in the same place you do,” he tells you. You didn’t expect this, and you don’t say anything at first, you just look at his scar, the way he wants you to. It’s deep and rough and jagged.

You might now cover your scars on your stomach and chest with foundation sometimes - Angela helps you with all this makeup business, she took you to the store and showed you what products fit you best. She’s never asked about the scars, but said you could tell her. Yoli once asked and you told her sometimes you’re not careful and sometimes your life hasn’t been careful with you. When Lara asked you just looked down at the floor like you were fifteen again and Spirsetskaya was asking you how your face got so bruised. The back of your neck is something you barely think about, much less to cover up, especially because your hair already covers it up. It always has. Maybe people saw it before and didn’t say anything. You can believe that. But now, under the bright lights, your hair flying around, you can understand how he saw it. Recognized it. “Vietnam,” he says, “1970.” You can hear outside, the breeze blowing around the palm leaves. “I was only there one month. One day I heard this crash and I woke up in a hospital and I’ve had this thing ever since,” he says pointing to the brace type thing he has on his right leg. He says all this as if he’s summarizing a minor injury. “Isn’t that something?” he says.

Spirsetskaya had your class read a book called _The Things They Carried_. It was about that war. (Americans have so many wars, you always say, every time you hear one of them talk about “the war” they mean a different one.) You learned a lot about what happened in that time, even though the stories were made up for the book. That was what the book was kind of about, though- a story can be made up but be about something real. One of the stories was about an American girl. When you read it you couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was brought over by a boyfriend to live alongside him in the barracks, and was the one girl who had traveled across the world. But soon enough, she went off on her own way. She kept disappearing for longer and longer, going off on her own in the country. Everywhere she went she would fight, and kill, and kill, and everywhere she went, she would bring destruction. At the end they found her on her own, an assassin, covered in blood, dead-eyed. She was a beast, steeped in blood. It was what her whole life had been leading to. It wasn’t that there was nothing left of who she had been, but that finally, she was living as who she truly was.

You touch his scar, and give a half-smile, an understanding in your expression reflected in the window you are facing. “Canada,” you say, “2004.”

You understand men. Women, not so much. Maybe you’ve only understood one woman. This may be because of your father, and if it is, it is an inheritance he never benefited from. He didn’t understand most people in general, not truly. But the moment he began to raise you as his own, that became your gift, your affliction. You understand them and that is why they despise you, or run to you, or run from you, or see you as family, or if not family, a kind of kindred soul.

“Mira,” he asks, “do you remember it?” You do, with frequency. You think about a lot of places. Not always, but frequently, Las Vegas. But you think of all your past places all the same, and wonder what you may have done differently and what you did and didn’t know, and ponder on what was done irrevocably and all the same. And you imagine it’s the same for him, thinking about the places in the past, the places across the oceans and the ones he still sees every day, but in a new era, the place it used to be now gone forever, its frame still in place but the tangible image gone like a stolen painting. What he has done, what he hasn’t done. You wonder if Lewis can somehow sense you were born with blood on your hands, the blood transferred by your father just as surely as the blood in your veins you share with him. If the part of him that never left the jungle can see the part of you that looked into a mine for the first time and never got the image out of your head of endless bottomless holes ravaging the world every time you go to a new place. You’ll never forget any of it. Not even if you wanted to. You know you shouldn’t.

You share his Corona together in the dim light, while the strained beat of that new “Judas” song plays in the background and you know Angela is commanding the audience’s attention. “Every day of my life,” you tell him.

_

Alex fires you one night. Some guy at the bar is grabbing onto Angela’s hand and she’s saying _hey stop_ and you can hear pain in her voice that she’s trying not to show, but he doesn’t stop, and he puts his other hand on her leg and before you know it you’re hauling off and knocking him in the face so hard he almost knocks into the bartop. “Get the fuck away from her,” you say.

“Fuck you, Russian whore,” the guy says.

“Oh yeah?” you tell him, viciously. “The shit you pulled will get you banned here.”

“Thanks for standing up for me,” Angela says after a minute. “You’re good, you know that?” You smile at her.

I hope to be, but we cannot always be what we want, you think. “You are,” you say.

“Look, Mira,” Alex tells you, once security has stepped in and the guy is kicked out and you’ve been questioned and Angela stands up for you to no avail, “I know that guy was breaking the rules but so did you and you’ve been pushing your luck for a long time now. You've got talent, but you cause so much trouble I can't hold onto you. You can’t do all this crazy shit and not expect consequences.” He has no idea what I’ve expected from the things I’ve done, you think.

You’ll miss the girls, but you always leave anyway, and they’ll be better off without you- they’ll make more money without you there. You were more than one guy’s favorite girl at the club. You’ve never thought you were the most beautiful girl in any situation but you’re the most exciting, the wildest, the most different. That always brings men to you and you think it always will even when you’re not this young. 

Walking around the city, you’re getting tired. The night is too humid for your black velour BCBG tracksuit- a rare remnant of Vegas, of living with Xandra and dressing like her, the exact clothes you came to this city wearing. You try hailing a cab but they’re all seemingly full, until what looks like a regular car- a Mercedes- pulls up. “I am not hitchhiking, but thank you,” you tell the driver, barely looking. You haven’t hitchhiked since you were a child, really. Theodora made sure you never did and she was probably right about that even though you always told her to not worry. You remember being thirteen and taking out a knife and telling the truck driver to not hurt you, just take you the hour and a half into town and he shouted kid what the fuck, and told you he’d just gotten the job, only graduated high school a few months ago, why would he want to kill some kid, and what the fuck was wrong with you? And he said he was only letting you ride along so you wouldn’t get picked up by someone worse. (That was part of why you thought to arm yourself- you thought of the news report about some killer you heard about in Alaska once, even though the television said he was in jail. You remembered yellow walls.) So you rode along, and the English version of a t.A.T.u song came on the radio and you turned it up, _they’re not gonna get us,_ and he said you reminded him of his little sister, always blasting the radio, and it wasn’t such a dangerous ride after all. And you remember Ed, sometimes. 

“No, no!” says the driver, whose accent is similar to yours, which catches your interest. “ _Unmarked_ cab. Good prices.” Why not.

“Very illegal,” you say, good humor in your voice. “But I am not a judgmental person. In fact I was just sacked for breaking protocol.”

He nods. “The taxi company fired me. Things happen.” He pauses. “My name is Gyuri. You’re not from America,” he states.

“Ukraine…Russia….everywhere,” you tell him. But you think you are here, for now. You aren’t yet done with Miami. You don’t want to give up yet, because you will not go back to Vegas and you know now that running away to California or some other place you don’t know a thing about won’t fix every problem. And you don’t have so much money, either. “My name is - “ you laugh. “Bohuslava. But everyone in America just calls me Slava.”

The two of you stop talking in English. “I have lived in America all my life. Mostly Brooklyn. But I will say, you should hear how the American man I worked for at the taxi company attempted my name,” Gyuri shakes his head, amused, like _can you believe what an idiot_. You’re at a red light and he looks at you, sees your disheveled appearance, scuffed heels from walking all over town. “Are you all right?”

You shrug and smile a little. “I have definitely been through worse.” After a quiet moment. “Don’t worry. No one is coming after me.”

The air conditioning reminds you of Mr. Decker’s house in Vegas; you inhale the icy air. Outside the window, the air is almost watery from the Florida humidity. You remember Papua New Guinea, but not as strongly as you used to. You have for a long time felt you will never live there, or anywhere, permanently. “You never told me where to take you,” Gyuri realizes and you both laugh.

“Fuck. I don’t know. I’ll pay you. My other job will give me my money in a few days,” you say. Your last paycheck. The season is over soon, and it was only a seasonal job, and Daniel hasn’t said anything about keeping you on. “Do you mind just driving around a while?” so you do, and you look at the city. All the bright lights and palm trees remind you of the Strip. “You want a different line of work, don’t you,” you ask.

“If it came to me, I would take it,” he says. It’s so late in the evening now that it’s starting to be early morning. When Gyuri goes to a diner you come along and order a coffee. You watch the sun rise. “All my months here and I’ve never done that,” he tells you. “It could be that I was not meant to leave New York.”

You think of how you always hear people saying here, I’ve lived here two, three, four years and never went to the beach. But you did the first night. Once you got your room, you took your keys and walked down to the area of the local beach where the fancy vacation houses were, even though it was closed and you probably weren’t allowed, and you climbed over the gate that was up to your waist and lay down there in the sands to sleep underneath the stars. You woke up in the middle of the night stiff and itching and not knowing where you were for a moment and for a few minutes unsure if you remembered where the motel was or if you wouldn’t be caught here after hours, and it took so long to wash all the sand off and you thought you were an ignorant, naïve child to ever try and beg for California and think you would have been able to help Theo by making her run to some place she didn’t know instead of going back to some place she may not have been ready for but knew anyway, and you thought of how Kotku said she always knew she’d go back, it was better than nothing and she wanted to be able to go to sleep some nights waking up with some idea of what the next day would bring, and she missed her mom. You aren’t either of them.

This morning you woke up the same person you have always been and you are not Mirjana. You are not from any place the way she is. You’re from everywhere now and belong nowhere. And for all your talk in your youth about the faults of this country, you’ve lived here long enough that maybe now you’re more American than you ever thought you would be. And you are not what you pretended to be these past few months under that assumed name. You are a criminal and a liar and a thief and you are too much of a traitor to ever be anyone’s friend. And the painting is back in your room, like a hostage, waiting for you. It is all you have. It really is. There is not going to be any more money. 

You look around to make sure no one is looking at the two of you, and lower your voice a little, staring Gyuri down. “What kind of work,” you begin asking, in Russian, so that no one overhears, “have you been considering?”

_

Antwerp and New York and Berlin and Amsterdam and Miami all over again. You are not like your father in this way. You can go back after all, but not forever. You rotate in an unending tour, country to country. Migration, like a bird.

The painting has been good to you over these recent years. Much better than you ever deserved. So it is fitting that through your own fault you lost it. You have told yourself, you will get it back, and you’ll know you’ll do anything you can to try. But this does not mean you will succeed. It occupies your thoughts, and Myriam and Gyuri can tell, and Myriam tells you not to let it distract you to the point where you cannot function, and Gyuri tells you he knows you want to try and make things right, and you don’t like talking about it, but you do all the same, because sometimes you think all you do is talk.

But now you are silent and restrained. You must be, sometimes. It is good, sometimes, when people do not know you at all. You have learned to understand that having a reputation means your reputation is often different from person to person, and that can be useful. 

This young man- boy, really- stares at you in fear. Your unblinking, unwavering dark eyes; the bare face that shows your rough skin and scars; the choker of rough garnets you chose because you are aware, especially in contrast with your skin, it makes you look like you are a risen dead woman. Maybe that is not so far from the truth. _Our friend Slava_ , some call you, because you make a point of being good to others, you might be a liar and a thief but you do not wish to inflict harm and you certainly would not want to be like your father. Some others: _the little Russian bitch with the big mouth_ , yes, who do you think you are? You suppose you do have a big mouth. When you show up with your associates sometimes you let them think you’re nobody, that you’re not the one in charge, but for better or worse, here you all are. _The very young woman with the_ _strange accent who showed mercy,_ this boy might call you, because he will probably not know whether to say you are from Russia or Ukraine or Miami or Vegas or Antwerp or what, maybe he will not even remember your name for sure, Mariya Zelenko, maybe, but it was certainly an alias? All of them are right and wrong. You remember some story behind an Italian sculpture some of the people involved with art you know spoke of: Queen of the Underworld. That is you. But you were not abducted. You descended willingly to your place.

“I do not like when people go behind my back,” you say in a way that could be described as imperious. You know people think you might be a bit unrealistic for vowing to not kill anyone- unless the case is self defense. But hey, they always say Elizabeth Petrovna was empress for twenty years without executing a single soul and so far you haven’t either.

But so many places were destroyed because of your father, so many people dead at his hands, and you now understand as an adult why people hated you, even if you wouldn’t hate a child in your place now, you understand. And if it wasn’t for your mistakes, a woman in Miami, an innocent bystander employed at a house, wouldn’t have been shot by the authorities when they came after the painting. You do not kill, you take pride in that. But you are not so innocent either and you will not pretend to yourself that you are.

Not everyone fears you, but that doesn’t matter if you don’t have to fear them, if everyone is getting along. You shrug and smile at him. “I know it was not your choice. You were not given options. You were told, lie or die. Do you know of the expression the three r’s?” He will not answer you. He does not believe you. You asked to speak with him alone. Not even with Myriam, although you will tell her all about it. You always do. Sometimes you think she would be better at all of this than you would be.

“What I am telling you is, fuck them. That is no way to live. If you come and work for me I will give you more money than they ever would give themselves.” You always have made big promises, even to yourself. But lately, you’ve been doing well, everyone around you has. He’ll have heard of you, this boy. You have a hundred names they call you (some much more senior associates you have refer to you as _our girl from America_ ; Martin, you heard, calls you _the black swan_ ; some in New York some say with genial affection _Bohuslava, a great friend to have._ _Giggleweed Slava_ , _Queen Jadwiga, The other girl who runs with Horst._ ), scores of aliases you have used (Mariya Zelenko, Halina Krol, Yelena Trutneva…). People know those names are you now. People know who you are. Everything about you is distinctive. “What do you think? Good deal, right?” It’s no option, really. “I have a place for you to work in Antwerp and they will never find you. New name, identification, no problems.”

He is staring at the ground and nodding his head, knowing he will say yes, knowing that his gestures are saying yes. He knows well who you are- but he has likely heard conflicting reports. There are not so many women around your line of work, and so young with no family members in the business…it is a bit unusual, to say the least. Your standing and background does look to others a bit at odds with your disposition. There are some who do not believe you will not kill. There are some who think your pleasant, if a bit rough, ways are warning signs for something sinister within you, something pushing at the surface like a wild animal struggling in weak chains. It cannot be that you are presenting yourself that honestly. “I just want to know,” you say, as casually as you can. “The people who employed you. What did they say of me?” You lean your head forward, just slightly. He is quiet. “I value the words of everyone I work with,” you tell him.

He raises his head. “They said they know of you but not who you are beyond your reputation and position,” he tells you, “they don’t know where you came from. They know you can make stacks and stacks of money come from nowhere. They know you are tied to art. The bird, they said, New York. They know there are some things you refuse to involve yourself or your associates with. They know you have so many secrets, they could never begin to find all of them.”

You consider this, thinking this is a fair assessment, and this boy’s employers may be worthy adversaries. You have not known many of those in your life. “That much is true.” You stand up and gesture behind you. He not quite afraid now, but still intimidated. This is what you do. No matter how kind you are people some will always fear you and nothing can be done, just like no matter what you do there will always be people who deride you as beneath them. You smile to him like you are a teacher and he is a student on his first day. “Go through this door,” you say, “and my associates will meet with you and see you to Antwerp. Everything is in place now.”

He bows his head to you in thanks. You raise your head. “All right then,” you tell him, “do not look behind you.” You are knowledgeable about that. People can tell you have experience. He takes your advice.

_

Queen Jadwiga, hah. The sound of that always brings you back to Bible School in Poland ( _Bohuslava are you even paying attention!)_ , even if it’s not even one of the names for you that gets the most use. You always liked her story. They didn’t teach it in the American schools. The thing was, Jadwiga ruled Poland, but they only call her the queen because she’d been a woman; had been a girl of perhaps eleven or so when she began her reign. But she was crowned as King – her father had been king too and in other lands as well- and ruled as such until her death at twenty-five. She got a lot done in those years, and they even made her a saint eventually. The girl who was a queen because she occupied the status of king. Her mother was assassinated. Of course, everyone who calls you this, despite that it’s a term of endearment ( _our Polish friend, we love her, brings in the money and weed like she’s queen of it_ ) is aware you’re not a saint. Are they aware you sometimes wonder whether or not you’re following your father, his reach around the world? Are they aware how long you’ve been running, how long ago you left childhood behind? Are they aware you sometimes wonder, distantly, if you will die before you are twenty-five? (None of them would ever suspect sometimes in the night when you’re alone and drunk or high and you look at a window and you feel so ill at ease with things you don’t really remember, you wonder again, how it really happened with her, and you think of your own past, behind you, that you feel like you could fall into sometimes.) If they are it must be only in the vaguest way, only if they have similar concerns and wonder if they are alone in them. As it so often is.

_

You know what Martin is, know enough to be afraid of him. Not afraid of him here in the moment, at some gala in a high-end Amsterdam club, where so many people in your line of work have gathered. But in general. He can control his impulses, when he isn’t high, and when he is it makes him wilder, but impairs him. This control may make him crueler, more technical, more despicable. But you were raised by a man with no control over himself and sometimes that is all the more fatal. Martin has a code, as they say. He has his own rules and logic he operates on. It is possible to work around that- not when he has his blades and guns and bare hands to your throat, your body. It’s not that your father didn’t have his own code in his career, but it all went down the drain when he drank. You have had to learn to survive someone who was not using any reason. Martin is a beast- perhaps your father was more like possessed individual, or some kind of storm. In a sense that is what you learned- how to survive in circumstances with no reason. And so you learned your own reasoning. 

They tell stories of him. Torture, hideous gruesome murders. But people have always been telling stories about you too. (Distantly you wonder if any of the drivers you hitchhiked with knew you were _that Ukrainian bastard’s girl_ and so that’s why many of them didn’t try anything with you, but they probably didn’t know, and of course, some of them did far more than try even though they knew.) Some of them are ridiculous stories. But the ones about Martin are true. You can tell. You’ve seen enough. Something you’ll never forget, in a corner of a warehouse, maybe five months ago.

There was a recent story with a missing man, and the news said the body of the missing man was never found. But you know what was done. You know there was nothing left to find. Pig farm, acid vat, pay off the guy who does cremations and disperse the ashes somewhere no one will ever see. Some of the real mafiosos, like in the gangster movies you sometimes watched in Vegas, bury bodies under false names, but that isn’t Martin’s style. And it’s what he does before the victim dies, too. You will never forget the moment Horst told you that Martin told him all about how an associate of his has a boar farm in Denmark. Such a beautiful country, Martin said, and its people are the happiest in the world; maybe Americans have a thing or two to learn from them. Sometimes, Martin had said to Horst, his voice pleasant as a tour guide, when he has something to take care of in business that’s a bit difficult, he goes to the farm in Denmark. It’s really a place that you can go if you want to disappear from the world. The boars are so strong, stronger than you’d imagine. Horst, when he was done finishing telling you what Martin said, looked at you and said he’d never seen you so speechless.

“I suppose you’ll never tell where you got it,” he says pleasantly, his American accent sounding vaguely of a Western drawl, but in his eyes, you can see the cold blade. You shrug and smile at him the way it is when two enemies can be honest with each other, not necessarily in words, but in actions, despite how ill at ease you are. “You know,” he says, “when I learned of the painting, that was when I truly understood you were something else. Bohuslava,” he says, over-emphasizing the syllables of your name, “I’m rare in this opinion even among some of my associates.” He sounds like he feels very generous, very intelligent and observant for saying so. “You are…like these art pieces. You had something others don’t. Yes, the painting, but the quality that led you and the painting together. Something that is all you.” He is a madman, you know that, and apparently a bit presumptuous, but you let him talk. You won’t cause a scene at this uptight gala. Not with him. If his manner was more blunt and coarse as, say, Blake, you suppose he'd say something like _you arrogant little Russian whore, if not for your leetle biiiird, you know where you’d be? Back in some shithole Soviet tenement with your skin falling off from too much krokodil._ Martin speaks plainly but sees himself as some kind of old-world connoisseur. You don’t have such illusions about yourself.

“I never tell my secrets,” you say to him, “but, then, you understand, most of us in this business are secretive”. _I am in your business only in name_ , you think. You’ve never told where you got it and you never plan to. (You might really kill her then). And you are the woman with a thousand names- false identities and ominous codenames and hissed insults and upbeat aliases, and you always have been. You are not a daughter of a powerful family in the business, you do not have anything you didn’t take for yourself. You are the woman from the shadows and no one knows who you are or where you came from and this, you think, is what Martin is getting at. This is why he genuinely respects you. He’s saying he sees you have a long path behind you completely shadowed and the painting’s mystery and presence is proof of your skill and your ability to keep yourself hidden, and this is what keeps him from calling you _the little Russian bitch who goes around waving her American money_ the way some do, this is what keeps him from letting them all take turns on you before he cuts your throat and makes your body disappear if you ever end up crossing him or if he just feels like it, this is why he speaks to you here and now. Because he kills women, and reportedly enjoys it. But he won’t kill people who he can generally coexist with, and if he does, it’s just a quick shot.

He smiles at you the way a teacher is proud of a student who gets a good grade. “That might just serve you well,” he says. You wonder if his stay in the hospital was meant to be a secret- or if he wants everyone to know.

You’ve been doing well enough, but the reasons go far deeper than you’d ever discuss with Martin. “I suppose,” you tell him, and walk away into the crowd, far from him before he can say anything else.

_

An antique-looking bar in a quarter of New York you rarely go into, the sort of place that is made to look like those places in past decades that would not allow unescorted ladies, but now just looks not old-fashioned, but just plain old. A successful deal with some people you never really have much to do with, but aren’t on bad terms with. A rare thing for some special occasion for them. The festivities in the bar that commemorated the deal are in effect over, the real boss guys all gone, Gyuri texting you he can come whenever you need him. You’ve always been one of the last people to leave the party. And apparently, so is Melina, who sits in the stool next to you at the bar, a cigarette she hasn’t gotten around to lighting between two of her fingers, two more used ones in the ashtray. Chestnut brown hair extensions, round diamonds studs in her ears, glittering ruby lipstick.

“So,” she tells you, after a quiet moment in your conversation. “When I heard this Russian girl was coming to town I didn’t think much of it. Then Kenny”- someone’s cousin, you think? – “goes around saying, oh, Slava the Snow Queen, that chick is out of this world! She’ll be good to us, real good, and I asked who the fuck is that, and why are you guys calling up Russians now”- that is another question you did not ask the client- “And he tells me, she’s got this reputation all around the world. Basically a Bond girl. Love her or hate her, but most of them love her, you never forget her. I said Kenny, you better not let that Jersey girl you’ve been dating hear you talk like that,” Melina laughs hoarsely. Sometimes you wonder if this is where Xandra would have ended up if Larry had been more successful in his own right. But then, you think, she would have taken off long before that.

“Loved those movies as a kid,” you say, looking at your wine glass. You’ve never really liked wine that much, but you had some out of courtesy. Besides, you’re in unfamiliar grounds, sometimes you just do what everyone else is doing. As you’ve grown into adulthood that gets somewhat easier, sometimes. You try and picture Melina as a fourteen or fifteen year old and wonder how she ended up here.

“Movies,” she says, rolls her eyes almost affectionately. “They don’t show the half of what it’s really like.” This is true, but you’re not sure what she’s getting at until she continues on. “I think, Slava, you’re a lot like me, in a way, even though we’re both in such different positions. It’s like, this world we live in, it’s a different one from the normal one, but we ended up here even though we weren’t born to it, and we’re still here and lasting, even though it very much is a ‘man’s world,’” she waves her hand around at the expression. “You know this is going to sound offensive but I don’t mean it that way. You’re from Vegas, so you should kind of get what I mean?”

“I might,” you tell her, somewhat interested to hear what she has to say. You wonder why it’s Vegas that was mentioned and not any of the other cities. Maybe because they can’t trace you before that.

“We’re both losers who got lucky,” she says. “I mean, shit. All I came here to do was be a waitress. Fuckin’ cliché. Start a new life in New York City, like everyone else. How the fuck did I know what I was walking into? I didn’t know who Peter was, let alone who his brother was. But I didn’t leave. Never tried to. And with all the shit I’ve seen, they ever want to do it, I’m collateral, just like that. So,” she says, laughing, “I’m lucky they do like me.” Among all that jewelry- no ring.

You think about how you go from place to place, and even then, so often overstay your welcome. A loser who got lucky, sounds like something Theo’s dad would say. Because of her you’re alive and here, that and because of what you did to her. If not for her and if not for what you did for her, both of those things, are why you yourself weren’t collateral at the hands of Xandra’s dealers, or something else, somewhere further along the line. One of those Jane Does on the television. A skeletonized corpse, long abandoned and forgotten in some blown-out meth house in the Mojave, so poisonous the snakes don’t slither on those sands. Your head bashed in by Blake, you in a morgue and him in a federal prison for the rest of his life, or vice versa if you followed through on your threat. Maybe if not for Theodora you wouldn’t have even gotten to the point where you knew about the bird and you’d have just died even before you hit sixteen.

You clink your glass against hers, maybe a bit too hard. You don’t think you could ever do what she does. Sure, you’d worry about being killed. But mostly you’d be worried about your life, every day an axe over your head in one form or another. “We are all good at different things,” that’s what Myriam told you once, “so maybe we are losers who got lucky. But sometimes we make our own luck. Take charge. Is not all fate and the stars and such, I would say,” you tell her.

“Hm,” she says, nodding. “You take good care of yourself,” she tells you. You really have. “Wherever you came from, you never went back, did you.” And, she is saying, you think, she didn’t either, she won’t, can’t without consequences.

“You could say,” you tell her, drinking the rest of your wine. “That I never stay in one place.”

“Smart,” she says, a bit quieter. Then, a short laugh: “We talk about movies, but you know? The world is yours? _Scarface_?” she laughs more, throws back her head.

“Shit. I loved that in high school,” you say, shaking your head. Barely remembering it other than that you watched it a few times on TV late at night. You were always so fucked up. It isn’t like that now. You keep your nose clean. No matter what else you do, you’ve calmed down with that. “If you believe it, I did go. But did not finish.”

“Yeah,” Melina says, a bit slowly. The night is getting to her. “Sometimes things don’t work out. And then other things do even if they shouldn’t.”

“I need to get going,” you say, “other business, you know,” even if that’s not true.

“Tell me about it,” she says, and the two of you pay your bill at the bar. Outside the thick glass of the window, you see so many cars and taxis it’s like rush hour is beginning to wind down even though it is late in the night. Gyuri will be waiting. And you are beginning to crave that new stuff you like a lot. Like falling asleep in the sunshine. And you are feeling tired. The nights and days are long, and all run into one another, unending, like taking a walk while high around a familiar neighborhood, but without any of the enjoyment.

_

Myriam’s car radio is always playing these Top 40 style hits. You aren’t sure what the charts are called in all the countries. Every time you hear this American popular radio music you’re fifteen, sixteen, seventeen again at some house party, or at least, you’re a couple years younger than you are now, in Miami, in the dressing room getting ready as some of the other girls are out there before you, and you’re all friends, but somehow you’re always apart in some intangible way.

With Myriam you don’t feel apart, so much as, two different people joined, for a similar purpose. She is enough like you to understand, and different enough from you that you can trust her as your right hand and one day your successor. Because, though it is unspoken, that’s not what everyone chooses their right hand man for, but it’s something you keep in mind. But when you met Myriam and really got to know her you knew one day she would surpass you. You would be her boss, not her mentor. Myriam, a few years older than you, dressed all in sleek black clothes and scented with Versace Crystal Noir (you think- every day she has a different scent, a remnant of her dream profession in her youth of being a perfumer), her ironed hair framing her serious face. Myriam, whose real first name is Gulnara, and whose hometown is Almaty even though she says she hasn’t been in five years because “some things you cannot bring home”, Myriam who speaks five languages, who has been to almost every continent and whose father was a soldier in the Red Army, and taught her how to be so quiet no one could sense her, if she ever wanted to protect herself preemptively. Myriam who showed you her tattoo once, the pentagram- “the pentacles in the Tarot,” she said knowingly, “mean wealth”. _Fortune, then,_ you said to her, and she shrugged in a way that would have made people think she was you had she been wearing a mask. “Is that how they speak of wealth in America,” she asked, and you said, on occasion, and she said, well, close enough sometimes. Myriam, who is taking care of something completely lawful in the nearby bank while you wait for her in the parking lot, the car on, windows open barely a crack.

This unusual song is playing, not so new as the other radio songs from what you remember, you haven’t heard it in a while- _just gonna stand there and watch me burn, but that’s all right because I like the way it hurts, just gonna stand there and hear me cry, but that’s all right because I love the way you lie_. You weren’t the one who threatened to burn the house down the way the man’s part goes, but even if you never wanted her to leave but understand why she did, you couldn’t have blamed her for it. You hope wherever she is, she isn’t blaming herself for what you did. She thought so many things were her fault. You hope she’s alive and well and not with people who tell her everything is her fault because you think if someone told her things were, she’d believe it. Myriam’s said something to you about how she’s seen a lot of women who stay with men who treat them bad because they think they deserve it. You hope your ignorant child-self didn’t make her think she deserved being lied to, being betrayed; you hope she never drank around you for any of the same reasons your mother drank around your father, even though you think you’d have noticed even then. You hope some part of her inside wasn’t broken by you.

Myriam gets into the car, her footsteps inaudible, her tinted sunglasses still on. Her roots were recently touched up, you can see. She sees you slumped back in the car. “Long week?” she asks you, taking off the glasses. Something about her is so perceptive that despite her lack of judgment you always feel like you have to explain yourself.

You give her a smile. “Is every week not a long week?” Sitting up, you look out the window. “I have something to ask you. This may sound strange but I really think we need to do it. Not quite yet, I know we have some things to take care of for now. But soon. This cannot wait forever. This has been left long enough.” Your more serious tone on _we_ indicates a broader group effort, and she nods her head in the brief, accepting way a soldier would- Myriam has never spoken ill of her father. Perhaps you would have liked to meet him. You’ve liked what he’s given his daughter.

Myriam raises her eyebrows, widens her eyes, the way she does sometimes when she begins to listen to something intently. “It is about my friend,” you begin. “Theodora, you know, Tsarevna Nesmeyana?”

Myriam turns her head to the side a little, puts her hand, holding her purple tinted glasses close to her head. She nods. “Yes,” she says, rolling her eyes a little, “I know her almost as well as I know you with how much you talk about her.”

“And the bird,” you tell her. Myriam does not blink, but puts a finger to her mouth in consideration.

Myriam narrows her eyes as if trying to put it together. “You always describe her as an angel on this earth,” she says, “but even the most kind and gentle of women will have secrets.” Myriam never underestimates or condescends to you, yet she also recognizes that you are just a person, and there are things that can be helped, things that cannot, and things that are best left as they are.

“The first step,” you raise a finger, “would be to find her.”

Myriam nods. She’s much better with computer things than you. Even Gyuri, who is always talking about “this Facebook, Tweet nonsense” has been telling you to get a cell phone that isn’t so old it barely works. “That will be no problem,” she says. “Especially given that she was…well known due to the attack.” You nod grimly. “Barely even a first step. That can be done, I am sure, in no time. From there?”

You inhale through your nose, the cold air sharply going in, and you feel your teeth tightly clenched. “Well,” you say, “from there….we will have to work things out as we go. It is a long story but I will tell you what there is for me to tell.”

“And what of Theodora?” Myriam asks, pronouncing the name sounding like there’s no h, kind of French-sounding.

Every day since you left her, you think, you’ve thought the same. What’s happening with her. What if you saw her again. What if she found you again. What if you never saw each other again. What if you never even knew anything again of each other. You’re not sure when you decided, or realized, that if you didn’t, it wouldn’t be for the better, as you tried convincing yourself for a while. Sometimes for things like this, there’s no easy way to tell when something happened or stopped happening.

“I plan on making things right,” you say, “I owe it to her.”

_

You are doing well, and no one is complaining, not really. That is when you meet Mikhail. Nice boy, a bouncer in a club. A normal nightclub, one that has nothing to do with any of the kind of businesses you do. He’s a student and in the autumn he has to leave. But for the summer, he is taken by you, and so you keep him by your side. For the summer, it lasts, and there’s no illusions that it’s anything more or less than it is.

“You never say anything about yourself,” Mikhail says, almost amused, one day as you are both illuminated neon beneath nightclub lights.

“I do all the time!” you laugh, because this conversation that’s rose out of nowhere isn’t going to turn to an argument, because nothing ever does. Nothing ever turns into much of a real conversation either.

“Hm,” he says, “well, sort of. But your life. Your past. Things like that. You say some things but nothing that can be really put together. Like a mystery.”

You think about it for a moment and shrug. “Both of us are like this, I suppose,” you say. You wonder who he is when he isn’t around you, if the person he is most of the time is who he really is, the way the person you are most of the time is who you really are, which you suppose you have to be grateful for, now that you think about it. Not everyone can be themselves. Not everyone knows how. Mikhail is probably not this complicated. You’re sure he isn’t. That’s what is so interesting about him. He’s probably the sort of person you would have avoided if you knew each other when you were younger. From another kind of life. You’ve made up vague stories about how your job is some kind of club promoter. He probably doesn’t completely believe it but he doesn’t push because you don’t push him, don’t ask him much either. Maybe, you think, he is grateful for a break from his studies, wants to have an adventure, a vacation from the life that he is set for. Or maybe that’s what you’re doing, and you don’t really know him well enough to know what he’s doing.

But in a way you know each other in a way that people who don’t ever get to know each other can make the briefest connections, but connections all the same. 

“What are you going to tell everyone when they ask what you did for the summer?” you ask him. He does have some kind of school-related job keeping him busy on some weekdays.

“That I went to outer space,” he says, and you both laugh, sounding out of your minds. But, you suppose, it’s true, that’s what both of you are to each other- rocket ships to places you can’t stay in, could never actually live in.

When the two of you step out of the club, you look up at the night sky. The city lights obscure the stars, but the moon is still there, full and silver, shining so bright you understand why all the scientists fifty years ago had their sights set on going there, that going there would be the ultimate achievement. You throw back your head and stretch out your arms like someone in an American tanning lotion commercial. “The best time of day,” you say, “I hate the sun.”

“Is that why we’re always getting together at night, never daytime,” he says, like you’re both in on some joke, even though you both know he has his work and his own life and you have yours, and he has no idea what your life really is. This is, really, the first time you’ve had a boyfriend. You’re pretty sure this is not the first time he’s had a girlfriend. It’s strange to think about something like this in terms of being a first.

“Yes,” you say, because it’s also true, and you should probably be afraid to be alone out at night, and you’ve lived through enough that maybe you simply stopped being afraid enough to be stopped, but you love the night, too, because it is both more wild and more honest than day, as far as you’ve seen. “Now where else is open at this time?”

In a year, you know, you won’t remember how his voice sounded, and if not you’ll forget something else; and maybe he won’t remember your eye color and maybe he never paid much attention to it in the first place. But it doesn’t matter. It is all right. Both of you will need to return to your planets, and stay.

_

_9/15: Today I went to the clinic. I had told Hobie I was seeing a new dentist, which provoked him to ask all these concerned questions about the state of my teeth and were the operations I’d had years ago in need of being continued, but I said it was merely a checkup, and I always like to keep my health in check. I really am a liar. When was the last time I had a physical? But, regarding what happened today - mercifully, the clinic didn’t have protestors all around it. I don’t know if the sight of them would have made me run away, or if I would have spit at them and told them what I couldn’t tell anyone else. I could have been honest with those people if they were there. I didn’t have many secrets there. You really can’t in any medical establishment, which is mostly what has kept me away from them._

_In the waiting room I kept nervously walking up to the desk asking, “please tell me, how much longer?” I thought I would break down, but I didn’t. The woman at the desk, wearing a purple sweater, pleasantly smiling at me, telling me not to worry. And not in the actual doctor’s office, either, I just felt as blank as if I were getting a flu shot. Something necessary. No big deal, unless you don’t get it done. Maybe there’s some kind of irony in what happened. Maybe I'm really nothing like my mother after all. But sometimes when I’m in Park Avenue I feel so far away from her, and I feel wrong for feeling that way, but I do. Physically, I’ve been living healthier lately. I’m engaged now as of one month ago. I am rarely alone anymore._

_I don’t know whose it was. It would have been from right before I was engaged. I suppose it’s a terrible secret no one can ever know about, that’s how the people on Park Avenue would see it. But I have no one to tell about it anyway._

_Tonight I have to pack because Kit and I are going to the Hamptons for the weekend. I have my sunglasses from Celine he gifted me, and a beach coverup that really covers every part of me like some kind of dark-green cloak, and a swimsuit that I may as well not bring because I won’t be swimming or sunbathing or taking off my coverup in front of the many, many people “weekending” there._

_I still kind of can’t believe I’m engaged. It happened so fast. Kit and I just spent so many days during the summer together and then when he was helping me up the stairs to Hobie’s shop (it had rained and the stairs were slippery with water and I was wearing three inch heels) he asked me, not even the way it’s usually done with getting down on one knee and pulling out a ring (I don’t feel like we’re that kind of couple, it was just so natural the way he asked it). The question came so simply and I answered immediately because what other answer was there? It just felt right. I think both of us have not felt right for a while, and being together helped us. Maybe we’re supposed to be together, and this will help the two of us make a new, better life together._

_When I was on my way out of the clinic I saw these two girls, high school age, together. They clearly weren’t related, must have been close friends. Just looking at them I felt this sense of mutual protection. They were sitting there whispering, close together, one putting her hand on the other’s shoulder. I remembered being younger than them and becoming obsessed with every striking stranger I saw, thinking about them for months. I remembered being their age. But I didn’t want to stare, and so I just left, and went to the nearest newsstand to buy the latest Vogue, and Hobie asked how my appointment went and I said it was fine. And it was. And he told me to enjoy my weekend, and I said, I would be right back to work on time, because I knew we had so much to do, I had so much to do, and I couldn’t wait for Monday in that moment._

_

It wasn’t hard to find her at all, _Theodora Decker_ , employee of _Hobart and Blackwell_. She doesn’t put too much of herself online – you could have guessed that, always so shy and secretive – which is probably a smart choice. It’s one you’ve made, even though sometimes there wasn’t much of a choice at all and you didn’t really have the time or opportunities to do things online like this. But in any case, you find the information of her workplace and employer (old Mr. Hobie, well maybe he is not so old after all, but they seem to live together given that the shop is also his place). She has no social media profiles. Googling her name is an onslaught of articles about the attack. One article about her graduating class at school. Myriam must have gone through so many of these articles, some of which you decide to read, before getting to the present. Or maybe she just knew what she was doing and found the shop right away.

Myriam was the one who really tracked her down, but you looked her up anyway. You felt almost intrusive about it, but you also felt like it was something you had to see. The articles, dated back to 2003, archived on newspaper and magazine websites. Charity, said one society column ten years ago, describing the Barbours’ taking in Theo. You find a society column from the past few months, Theo grown and on the arm of one of the Barbour sons (not the one who was her friend), looking away from the camera, probably the most beautiful woman at the charity function the paper said she was at, but certainly not the happiest, from how she looks. One small-town Kansas paper that still remembered its former citizen, the daughter of traveling performers who became a model in the big city, had a photo of Theo’s mom with a young girl you realized was Theo, the picture dating 2002. She was so young. Both of them, really. You looked at it for a while. Then you looked up her mother, and learned more about her, saw what was out there.

So, you decide to visit the shop, just a preliminary visit when she isn’t there. And Gyuri agrees to look around the area but at a separate time than you – “two of us looks too noticeable,” he says, and you agree. It’s certainly the right place, although when you go you end up visiting when the old man isn’t there and neither is Theo- strange, but maybe best for these circumstances. You’ll be back soon enough.

_

_12/9:_

_I keep thinking, I don’t know if I can do this, but I guess I’m going to. Now that I’ve thought about it, I can accept an affair. I’ve calmed down and it was going to happen, probably, and this marriage isn’t about things like that. He probably wouldn’t care if I had an affair, I think he’d be rather understanding, and under different circumstances I would have been understanding too. Maybe I’d even be friendly with the girl if she was someone else. But what I couldn’t accept, and can’t, is Em, who despises me. I remember Mrs. De Larmessin (who calls me “the bride” in a tone that sounds like she’s saying “the infection” ) and some bridal tailor talking about how none of the bridesmaids have “the right skin tone” for emerald and thus my idea for them to have emerald green dresses to match the earrings I’d wear wasn’t right. Maybe that was for the better, because she’s the only bridesmaid whose name I can keep straight, and the idea of her wearing the color I associate with my mother and her jewels seems less like asserting my influence and more like lying down and letting everyone walk all over me. I really don’t want her as my bridesmaid anymore. The thing is aside from that the bridesmaid situation makes no difference to me. I don’t know any of these people._

_I got pretty mad at Kit and he wasn’t so happy with me either, we didn’t have a good night for some time, but then we managed to sort it out, I suppose. I said some things that I suspected were true, things I don’t like talking about- I’ll always be a charity case at best. Just some cheap druggie slut who has to be “made presentable”- as one of the stylists said. I spend so much time trying to act and look perfect and it gets me nowhere._

_“I know about all your things,” he said, like we had some kind of understanding and for a minute my heart stopped but there’s no way he knew about the operation. We sort of talked about the drugs. But it was under his roof I first really began with them._

_“I’ve been loyal to you from the moment we were engaged,” I told him, and he can make what he will out of that, because it’s true._

_“Em has always hated me. Does she talk about me to you? What does she call me? Does she say that she’s your real wife and I’m too stupid to understand I’m a mistress being paid off?” I’d said in the more argumentative part of our discussion._

_Anyway, I’m not so mad about it anymore. When Kit said he doesn’t expect me to understand what it’s like to love the wrong person, I did understand where he was coming from then, because I did know, only I didn’t say that. I didn’t think that would help either of us. I think in a sense we make a good team. I just hate all this engagement and bridal madness, and if we have to go through with it, I don’t see why we can’t just elope to one of the nice destinations he’s always going on about and get it over with. Preferably not one of the islands with nothing to do but sail, though._

_Also Grisha recently told me about some strange, dangerous looking woman hanging around the shop….and I’ve seen a few strange people hanging around lately too. None of them have spoken to me yet. If Reeve has some little spies or whatever working for him I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do._

_

Sometimes you think of a conversation you and Kotku had at her place a long time ago, watching TV (the program was showing Los Angeles) while she told you to be careful with your hands because she just did your nails. She was always so worried about you. Maybe you should have been more worried about her. You remembered it in Miami, when you and Gyuri first made your plans together and you thought you were never meant to live the life you’d been claiming for those months, a life above the underworld.

This was back when everything was as it used to be. Back before you really understood what saying goodbye meant:

You said someday you wanted to run away to California. If your dad ever had to leave Vegas, you wouldn’t go, not that you don’t love him but you can’t leave with him again.

She told you she knew you couldn’t, because she knew how you felt, and she’d been there before, and she’d had to run. But it was supposed to be temporary. There would be an end to the running, too, not just running forever, and you thought, but didn’t say, your dad is already running forever, all around the world with no end in sight. And so Kotku told you more about when she ran away, not just what happened when she was away. She said the R&R was her home, it was all she knew, but sometimes if you only know one thing you do it even if it’s not good for you, and you thought of her older boyfriend Mike who she still called on the phone and was still too afraid to leave even when he was hundreds of miles away in the Coast Guard. Her home was the place where she would wrap herself up in the floral bedsheets feeling like she was in a garden when the sunlight came through the window in the morning, the place where Mateo who owned the building and was always at the desk had known her and her mom forever and didn’t judge her and her mom and would help her with math when she didn’t understand the homework. The place where she could step out her door and watch everyone go by on the highway and see all these different people from everywhere going to the city in Avon cars and pizza delivery vans and hearses and landscaping trucks and ambulances and party buses and tourist RVs and Harleys and vintage Cadillacs and airport shuttles and newlywed limos, and it was like seeing how different people can all be together but not know anything about each other but all still be in the same world together making it the way it is. She said you couldn’t see the whole world from there but it was like you could see everyone in the world on their way somewhere. Once she saw a mountain lion, in the dawn of early morning, crossing the road, and never forgot the sight, the cat walking as confident as someone walking their way home. The place where when she was eleven, twelve, she’d run around the parking lot with Tina her friend who used to live there until her dad died and she had to go to a foster home and Kotku couldn’t remember being as sad as she was that day ever since, but they’d walk down to the Burger King and buy chicken fingers and if they didn’t have any money they’d ask tourists for a few dollars, and walk to and from the school bus stop together. The oceans of sky: navy blue and fire red sunsets, silver-white and dark purple lightning flashes, double rainbows, blood moons, the neon lights that existed before the Strip, before Area 51 or Route 66. The place she lived when her mom told her that depending on yourself and living your own life was important. And it was the place where one day she realized she only ever felt angry and sad and afraid. She was getting hurt every day and somehow couldn’t tell her mom. She would cry or get into fights at school and was afraid to come home and stayed places she didn’t like being. It was a good place, and bad place. And when she had thought of it that way she knew she would run away, and she knew when it was over she’d come back, but it wouldn’t be forever, because she wasn’t sure if she’d want to go back at all if it hadn’t been her home forever, if it hadn’t been for her mom. “I want to learn new things and do new things and go so many places. I don’t want to only ever do things just because I don’t know how to do anything else. I’m really glad I know you, Slava, and I really hope you know what I’m trying to say,” as an adult you do, you think you really do, “I love this city, honestly, I always will. But I can’t be here forever. I have to leave sometime. And I don’t want to run.” 

Maybe Theo wouldn’t listen to you. She would say, in that clipped, elegant voice like someone in one of the classic films you watched, like Grace Kelly in _To Catch a Thief_ , the one she uses to hide how hurt she always is, _and you think you can lecture me about something like this._ Or she’d tell you _fuck off you lying bitch_ and laugh miserably, _you’re the one who runs, look at how you’ve stayed away, look at me, I’m right where I’m supposed to be._ Or she wouldn’t say anything because sometimes the truth is too difficult for her to engage with at all, and maybe you aren’t worth her time anymore. But you want to tell Theodora about this sometimes, whenever you remember it. Because you didn’t realize it at first, but she hasn’t gotten away from anything, either. Stay away from the people you love, they will kill you, you tell her, but it was really you explaining where you’d been, and why.

The night you reunite with Theodora and tell her the truth and realize she never knew the truth, the night you go home with her accepting anything can happen and finding after all you’ve done all she planned was to show you Popchyk and for a moment it was like nothing had ever happened, but then the moment was over and it was years later after all and some things are like that and she never allows herself to stand close to you or let you touch her even on the shoulder the way she used to, and you meet Hobie for real, and you feel so happy because you know you’re going to make things right, but you also feel this sadness, because some things aren’t right, and can’t be fixed so surely as returning a painting, a difficult task to carry out, but if it is done right, it is simple.

You lied to her but at the same time you told the truth. That’s how the two of you do things, you suppose, because that’s how it always has been. You wish it could be the opposite. Maybe it is too late for you to do anything but recover her bird and that is the one thing that can be fixed, the one thing that can be returned.

“I am going to make everything right,” you promised her, and she looked at you like she wanted to believe you but still was trying to make sense of everything and wasn’t at that stage of deciding whether or not to believe yet. You didn’t think it would be news to her. You’d thought she wouldn’t hide it away all that time- you wonder why she couldn’t even look at it. Does she feel bad about taking it? Does she think it’s her fault that you took it, and everything since?

You were telling the truth when you said you were mostly done with doing coke, because mostly, you are. And you think she didn’t lie, but was hiding something from you, when you mentioned that, in a very familiar way you’ve seen too many times, in a way you know because you’ve done it too. You were telling the truth when you said she was the only girl you had ever _been to bed_ with even though once in Antwerp there was a girl with glasses and a tattoo of a bird and long dark hair in a club and you went into a back room with her; even though once when you stayed at Angela’s house for her New Years’ party and everyone else had gone and you were watching TV on her couch and her grandfather was asleep in the other room and she kissed you and you kissed her back and then there was no stopping and she told you that there was nothing wrong with it, there was nothing wrong with you and you didn’t have to always be so secretive; even though once when you were coming back from a party you kissed Kotku and she looked at you for a long time understandingly and said, _we don’t have to, just because of, you know, it’s okay if we don’t,_ and then you were both quiet but she smiled at you and put her arm around your shoulder and said one day things would be fine for the both of you because you’d both fight like hell for it, wouldn’t you. You think Theo was telling you the truth when she said she doesn’t love her fiancé that much. You certainly told the truth when you told her no man was ever going to marry you, you would be too much for any man. But sometimes, even now, you think you lie to her not because she can’t deal in truth but because it’s easier for both of you to put off dealing with truth, because both of you are too used to lies. Maybe you can make this right, too, the both of you.

_

At the engagement party you are struck but not surprised by how out of place you look compared to nearly everyone else. If this wasn’t the specific event that it was, you wouldn’t care at all, you might even like that. (Like the time you showed up to this club in Amsterdam that was used as a front for money laundering, you walked in definitely not looking as straight-laced and professional as some of these guys you work with or the people at the party now, and you threw down the envelope of cash and said to the owner you knew he’d been double-crossing others, and it won’t be a problem if you let him take this place off your hands. But the real reason you’d gone out of your way to do it, and enjoyed it so much, and laughed when he said _you won’t always be this lucky you little Russian cunt_ even though Myriam was right beside you calm and grave as a stone, was because you knew he’d been mistreating the girls there, making them come in when they were ill, things like that. _Ukrainian cunt_ , you laughed, because only recently have you been so lucky, and held your head high like he’d honored you, and extended your hand for him to shake, _wonderful to do business with you!_ And it was. And now here, they stare at you- _who brought his ugly mistress_ , you infer, from experience, they think. But no one needed to bring you and were you not invited you think you would have come anyway. That’s how you do things.)

But you’re only here for Theodora.

Everyone looks so modest in a way that, when you actually think about it, serves to show off their wealth in a far more obvious way than wearing big jewels or blatant brand logos, a very detailed way of maintaining the image. You understand this kind of thing now that you are older. These kind of old-money American people don’t call their own lives or possessions or styles “classy” or “posh”; no, that would be for people who haven’t always had money. (People like you! It’s really very funny how much they think about it so much.) You’re fine how you are and if people are going to stare at you for showing skin or wearing this kind of cut or material or color scheme in winter (are these people still traditional enough to think about not wearing certain things based on the season? You will have to ask Theodora about all of this), then so be it. It’s a vintage Versace, very nice.

_And what costume shall the poor girl wear to all tomorrow’s parties…._ the lyrics come back to your memory, like an understanding hand on your shoulder, like they always were to you, and her. But the DJ is playing _we found love in a hopeless place, we found love in a hopeless place._

You see her. Uncomfortably reaching out her hand to display a ring, green tourmaline on gold. She smiles when a couple comes up to talk to her, but she looks stiff and uncomfortable, her eyes distant and fearful and lost, and when the couple leaves she goes back, her face blank. She’s looking for a way out. Even her hair is all trapped, not a single strand out of place, knotted up at the back of her neck. She used to wear it loose and you would bury your face in it when you held her and told her you’d never leave her and she’d be all right. Maybe you can’t make it all right for her anymore, maybe you don’t have the right to try anymore, maybe you never would have been able to even if you weren’t the thief who betrayed her. But you have to tell her she can do it for herself. You’re not sure if anyone else is telling it to her.

Neither of you are anything like these people and it would be that way even without the issue of money, of status (you will think of this a few years later when you are speaking of it with her and you say you have money, and she says, not as much as they do and even if you did, it wouldn’t matter). They’ve never had to flee the country, stained with a dead man’s blood from your father’s too-close embrace, because there are options other than that but none of them are real. They’ve never been fourteen, holding onto a motorcyclist’s torso and claiming to be twenty, knowing they’d be free of one bad situation if they just told him to keep driving and never asked anyone else for a ride back home, but knowing they won’t do it because they’re not so bold or adult as they think. Maybe you don’t know their lives. But they don’t know yours. And they don’t know hers, either. She can’t trace her lineage back hundreds of years’ worth of family trees of American royalty. This is the girl who ran into the night alone rather than let the state of Nevada decide where she’d go; this is not someone who would ever be able to do what anyone wants from her, even if she wanted to. She is like the bird. Trapped and alone, and the part where she is alone cannot be underestimated. 

And a few people walk up to her and a woman touches her delicately on the shoulder and she smiles placidly and the people move closer and you can hardly see her now. One of the people moves to the side for a second and her face hardly moves, like she is frozen, like she is wearing a mask. You realize the foundation that has been put on her is shades paler than she actually is. 

She will never be happy this way. You know that and she has to know that. She would never be happy spending the rest of her life depending on her husband matter how good her husband would be; she would never be happy in high society surrounded by people who would never forgive her for not being one of them no matter how much she tried; with or without the drugs she would be never alone and always in isolation, always miserably and brightly blank-eyed as a doll or helplessly staring at her feet like the frightened child she hasn’t left behind. The ice in her that would sometimes come out when you were both young, the ice that you lately have seen come out to protect her, it would take her over entirely, become her whole self until she was replaced entirely by this new self she is creating to make herself be; her adaption to the environment. She would be entombed in herself. She is like the painting, like the trapped bird, but you can’t steal her, too. You think no one could ever really do that to her even if she tried to make it happen, as you think she’s doing now. She can never stay in one place forever. Maybe she is like you after all.

She looked this way so many times when you were both young, so many parties, she’d stared into her drink or at a wall or vacantly into air, the moment before she’d beg you _please Slava I don’t like it here, I want to go home_. And that’s when you know- this time, if this time you do the asking, she’ll come with you. Her mother’s earrings glimmer from her earlobes, reaching down. Her choice. Something they didn’t manage to impose on her.

She’ll go, because you want to make it right with the bird and she wants that too, and she’ll go, because she wants to leave anyway.

You feel a strange sort of peace inside of you. A young man with red hair turns to you. “Hey. I don’t believe it. You must be Slava,” he says. You smile.

“I am. And I take it you are a friend of the bride?” you assess him, raising your eyebrows. No ring on his hands. American accent. Clothing that doesn’t make him look like some Wall Street robot. Red hair. Seems gentle enough in a way you’re not quite familiar with. Philip? You almost don’t believe it, but who else would it be?

“Philip Blackwell. I’ve heard so much about you. It’s really nice to meet you, I feel like I already know you.” _What?_ You almost say, amused. If this was someone from the Barbours' guest list you’d think, _you don’t know me at all_. You wonder what Theo must have told him to make him think you are so familiar, and that meeting you is a nice thing.

“This is true?” You say. “Well. I have heard a thing or two of you myself, Red. At least in past years. When we were all young.”

“We’re still young,” he says as if convincing himself. Soon enough you all won’t have to put yourself through this kind of thing anymore.

“Maybe in some ways more than others,” you shrug.

“You know, in those days I really had no one. I was all alone.” He says this matter-of-factly, like he’s thoughtfully analyzed his place in the events for years and come to sensible, if unideal conclusions. “When Theo would tell me about her time with you when she came back to New York sometimes I’d think you were the best things that could have happened to each other.” You used to think that, too. But you don’t say this.

“You could be right,” you tell him. “I know I was not always the best thing for her, still am not. But her…” you smile a little, trail off without meaning to.

“She really missed you,” Philip tells you. “I think she’s not very happy and I think you know that too. Maybe I’m not very happy either, but it’s not as bad as it used to be. I mean to say, I think she’s happy that you’re back.”

“Don’t worry,” you tell him, and this, you know, may not be true forever, but is true for now, so it is not a lie, “I will not leave her.” Maybe she will leave you. Maybe she has reason to and will have more reasons to come. You know you’ll never be able to or want to control her. But you refuse to run away from her now. Once was enough. “But, this should be a happy night. A celebration.”

“Right,” he says, smiling. “And it’s the holidays, too. It was never the same in Texas as it is here.”

You mockingly shudder. “Oh, Texas. How I suffered there, _brat moy_.” 

“Theo knew so much about Texas from what you told her,” he says with something that sounds like compassion, some kind of pleasant surprise. “She’d always surprise me by knowing things about there even I didn’t know about.” For years, she didn’t hate you, she told people all about you. 

Then some people pass by, and you can see her and she can see you, and she looks almost like she’s shocked to see you here even though you were invited, and it’s like seeing her for the first time in years on the streets by the bar again, except this time you know everything will be all right now, or not everything, but enough to count.

She sees you then, looks at you like she’s seeing clearly for the first time in a while. You think, now that both of you are together, things will turn out for the best- because nothing ever stopped you together, so nothing can stop you now.


	4. The Goose Girl

IV: The Goose Girl

_“"You are the one," said the old king, "and you have pronounced your own sentence. Thus shall it be done to you."-_ “The Goose-Girl”, The Brothers Grimm

It is three and a half months since Amsterdam and Antwerp and everything. A lifetime, for her, you think.

A lot of things are better, a lot more than you thought, a lot more than Theo thought from how worried she was. But now, you think, these past few months, she seems less worried about everything that crosses her path. Maybe sometimes, not everything can be made right all at once, but you can still work at it, and keep going.

“You’re all right?” she asks you calmly, but you can tell she is concerned. She does not look to your arms, but this, you can tell, is the respectful understanding she has after years of unkind examinations that were not out of concern. You’ve come to her home in New York, the place at the antique shop. She’s here for a few days’ layover before she goes to Texas, which she dreads, not because of the appointment – she seems at peace with all that, ready for it – but because of the location.

“I am not the one who has to go to Texas,” you say. You know not every place in Texas is where you were, and you’ve been there a few times, but you have no fond memories of living there, though not so bleak that you cannot joke about it.

“You always did have a fucked up sense of humor,” she says, half-smiling. Before you can say anything: “I guess I did too, or else, I wouldn’t be where I am now. Anyway. It won’t be that bad.”

(“You probably know,” Philip had told you at the engagement party, sensing something was going on, “but she’s missed you a lot.” You still miss her a lot even though you have been seeing her more often lately than you have at all for years.)

“Hey,” you tell her, “we are where we are supposed to be.” And she looks at you, her lips tight together and her eyes wide like she wants to tell you something but can’t. You already know, it’s what you talked about in Antwerp, it’s what is between the two of you, always present even when not spoken of. When you said goodbye to her at the Antwerp airport she looked at you the way she looked at you when you left her for what both of you believed was the last time in Vegas. 

She takes a deep breath and embraces you so tightly you almost ask if she is all right. But then, just as soon as she does it, she steps back and looks at you, her eyes wide. “I don’t know about that,” she says, her voice tentative, “but I think I’m who I’m supposed to be now.” You were always yourself, you want to tell her, but you know what she means. She’s not the bird chained to the wall anymore. She once was, but she realized she doesn’t have to be. You realize she’s standing so close to you that her feet are against yours, and she takes both your hands in hers. Her face is up against yours, her mouth just barely touching yours, like she’s not sure what to do or where either of you are, and for a moment you’re so surprised by her that you don’t do anything, but then you do, because you don’t want her to think she’s unwelcome if you just stand there like a statue. You let her know she is the last thing from unwelcome.

Later, the two of you will be packing her bag together. Trying to figure out the right clothes to bring to Texas. When you think it looks like she has enough for the days she’s going, you put your arm around her shoulder and lean her head against her, and she does the same after a moment.

“Do you remember when you asked me if I was happy,” she says, like she’s not really asking.

“Of course I do,” you tell her, “of course.”

“Well,” she says, almost a whisper with how she’s lowered her voice. “I don’t think I’m happy. But it’s not as bad anymore.”

“That makes me happy,” you tell her. She looks at you, moving her head.

“But are you happy,” she says. “Are you doing well.”

In the moment, you think, this has been one of the better days you’ve had in a very long time. “So happy, Theodora,” you tell her, holding her, closing your eyes. “So well.”

_

_guess where I’ll be for a few days starting tomorrow?_ Theodora texts you in the later half of winter. She sounds like she’s in a good mood, that, or she’s impatient and expecting you to know an answer to the question that she thinks is obvious. But probably the first one. You’ve been meeting up in various places when both of you can. On your long-ago motel vacation you wrote down false names, Bond girls’ names, in the guest book; and now you are traveling the world on liaisons.

_If I cannot you will tell me anyway,_ you respond a few hours later, adding one of those emojis, a little cartoon image of a talking woman raising a hand. She immediately texts back.

_MIAMI FLORIDA, SLAVA_ comes the first message and then _I really did not expect that item to end up there.._. and you don’t know anything about it and she shouldn’t expect you to, but then, this is likely an invitation- “you don’t know but you will soon enough.” Well, you were going to be in New York that week, but no one can stop you. Myriam is skilled enough to take over for the time being. (“You would have had to do that permanently if things had gone a bit different in Amsterdam,” you always remind her, “I chose you with something like that in mind. You are a like minded woman;” and all she said was, she’d do it, but things didn’t go that way.)

The two of you planned to meet at her hotel but, forget that. You’re in Miami before the airplane lands and it doesn’t take long to figure out where and when she will be coming out of the terminal. For a moment, when you’re there, you wonder if you’re going to miss one another, and there are so many people from the New York-Miami flight coming along you can barely see through the crowd. But you’re standing alone, right in the open, and she’d have seen you. Even if she was angry with you she’d never be able to ignore you. But lately, the issue at hand, you know, has been something more complicated to deal with than anger. Maybe you should stay away from her. “Should” hasn’t often been something you’ve understood.

In the cool-air conditioned airport you are reminded of the unnaturally chilled house in Vegas. And you see her then, dressed in tan linen and large sunglasses, which is more relaxed than you’ve seen her dressed in years, though her limbs are still all covered up. She looks like a resortwear runway model and you feel like you’re fifteen again, looking at the gentle, beautiful girl who doesn’t seem to notice you or anyone, except this time, she doesn’t look like the saddest person you’ve ever seen on both hemispheres. None of these people in the crowd would ever guess a few months ago she’d lain on your couch shivering from withdrawal. If you didn’t know her, you wouldn’t guess. But you do know her.

You push your way through the crowd and underneath her sunglasses you see her face change. “Slava! What are you doing here!” she says, surprised and overwhelmed but not unhappy.

“I came for you, of course,” you say. “Now let me help you with your bags,” you take her rolling suitcase, and walk through the crowds, the two of you so used to making your way through large groups of people. You make your way outside, into the always-summer of Miami.

_

“I want to show you the places I would go,” you tell her. You’re in the passenger seat of her rental car. (“You can’t walk anywhere,” she complained, and you said, ah, but that didn’t stop me from walking!) “You know, after I left Vegas.” You direct her to the store and it looks exactly the same, but when you park in the lot in front of the shop and go in, all the products look mostly the same, but you don’t recognize anyone. You weren’t expecting to.

“All these places look basically the same,” you tell her, not sure if you’re disappointed, not sure how to define what you are thinking. “Florida, California, Rhode Island.”

“May I help you?” asks an employee, a woman who looks about retirement age, with dyed auburn hair and pink glasses. Her name tag says _Mary Ann_ , and underneath, _Tennessee._

“No thank you, Ma’am. We are just looking,” you say, and then you add, “I used to work here, you know. Not even ten years ago. But so much is the same.” Maybe it isn’t, really, but in here it is. You remember the tourists who’d come in and share stories with you, talk to you without you starting up conversations, like you were just any average person, like they’d never think to call you a devil child who needs to get out or a little cunt who’s lucky she hasn’t gotten taken care of by now. (As an adult sometimes you wonder if maybe the reason why people like you better when they don’t know your father is because you’re really not that bad after all.) _We’ve been coming here fifteen years_ , said a middle-aged married couple once, a man and woman from Chicago with tinted sunglasses buying neon sandals, _and somehow we always forget to bring flip flops!_ I forgot to bring a fake ID from a country I’ve actually been to, you could have said. People would say things to you like _We love it here. How long have you lived here? Do you go to the beach all the time, because I sure would. If you live here is it all normal to you, and you’re used to it,_ and that’s the kind of question that could take a long time to answer, so you just said, _ah, I lived in Las Vegas too, I always end up in places that are exciting! Have fun holiday!_

Mary Ann smiles like you’ve told a hilarious joke. “I can barely remember ten years ago, doll,” she says, and a small noise like stifled laughter comes from Theo’s mouth.

But you say, “I do. Daniel, is he still the manager?” and she tells you she doesn’t know any Daniel around here. “You are from Tennessee. How did you decide, here?” you ask her the way people asked you why you chose Miami for Vegas. You wonder if she gives the same answer every time someone here asks.

She smiles, pleased with herself. “I realized I could, and why not?” she says.

“Did you hear what that woman said? I wanted to say to her, fuck, you don’t know the half of it!” Theo laughs in the car later, her face horrified at the inappropriateness of it all. She bites her lip. “Man,” she says, calmer, “Sometimes I look in my old journals and I don’t remember anything of what I wrote. It makes me wonder if some of those things even happened.” You don’t know what she wrote, and you weren’t there for a lot of it. You can’t claim to be able to solve all her problems. But maybe they’re not all problems.

“You can talk about it,” you tell her. “You can tell me.” She looks at you at the red light, her eyes soft and expectant behind her large sunglasses.

“Tell me where the club was next,” she says, her voice soft. “Maybe I’ll talk about it later, okay?” She drives a while, through the wide roads edged in palm trees in lines like soldiers.

Down the street with the cypress tree, the shop with the red awning, the benches, further down the small building where the club was, and you see that it now appears to be a seafood restaurant.

“This was it,” Theo says as she realizes she’s in the right place.

“I miss them sometimes,” you say. Because you miss Angela and Yoli and Lara, and you wonder if they ever think of you, if they still know each other. And you miss Judy and Bami and Kotku and everyone else you’ve had to leave, and you will always be happy you were able to meet all of them, and maybe you’ll never stay in one place but part of you will always wish you hadn’t always had to run from one place to another with no end in sight. But that part of your life, you think, might not be permanent either, if nothing is.

In the parked car you put your hand on her knee. She tenses a little, like some kind of involuntary reflex, but then relaxes. “I fucking missed you, too, you know.” She doesn’t move for a very long time, nor does she speak. She rests her hand on yours and your fingers intertwine. Neither of you say anything about it.

“There will be a lot of traffic,” she says, sounding worn out. “We should get back soon.”

_

“You know this is one of my last trips,” she tells you, back in the hotel room, like she almost doesn’t believe it. “This one and a few more and then I’m done. With all of it.”

“But you do not sound so happy,” you say. Because she doesn’t even though she likely should.

She gives a sad smile. “I made those lies right. And I really liked traveling. I was…happy,” she almost whispers in her breathy voice. “And now that I have to go back, am I just going to have to go back to normal and have to live out some Scarlet Letter life as the trainwreck girl back in New York again? That’s what I have waiting for me? I can’t even work for Hobie anymore.” Maybe it’s an exaggeration, but you understand the worry. Over these years you’ve realized the family of her dead friend are not quite jailers and not quite perfect, either. They are not her real family but she’s told you that they’ve been understanding to her since you left with her that time. It’s other people, the ones she knows less, that she worries about. And herself.

“Who is saying you cannot work for Hobie! You should do whatever makes you _happy_ , Princess, fuck knows you need more experience in that.” She smiles a little at that, shaking her head.

“No. It’s done.” Decisive. Passionless. “He says I’m always welcome to live with him, and I’m not leaving him now. We…I mean at this point we may as well be real family, the closest I have left. But I can’t work in the shop anymore. Not officially, not for a salary. If anything, all this has given him the initiative to take more action as the shopkeeper so things like I did won’t be done. For his sake and mine. I’m getting another job.” She sighs.

“I take it not for my Cleaning Service,” you say lightly, even though most of the time Myriam is doing both of your work now. You’ve long past given up asking Theo seriously about it.

“It’s for a fashion magazine.”

“Perfect!” you say. “Style and beauty and glamour, similar to your mother, no? Your vision will make people buy!”

She laughs a little. “I’m working in the wardrobe. A lot of rare items, vintage, things like that. And this isn’t a really big publication like _Vogue_ or anything. More of those thick magazines in the top shelves in the fashion section in the bookstores that people always ignore,” she says. “It’s kind of a new publication too. So, we’ll see how it goes.” You can tell she’s looking forward to it, but is somewhat nervous.

“I will read every page,” you say, raising a hand, and the corner of her mouth goes up.

_

When she’s in bed with you for the last time that trip, she is staring down at you like one of the love goddesses in her paintings, you tell her _my angel my minx_ and she looks all modest and says _oh Slava oh…_ and it goes like that, until she looks for too long in between her leaning down to kiss you so you can’t talk and you pinching her thighs so she laughs, and then she sees, and she clutches your arms the way she did when you were lonesome frightened children, as if that will get rid of what’s there, and her face twists and she begs you in abject horror _you have to stop, please Slava you have to stop doing it_ and you think she will cry because it sounds like she already is, but nothing is coming from her eyes and she turns away from you but lets you hold her still. Less than a year ago it was a hazy conversation- why not stop, you know why, and that was the end of it, but both of you knew it wasn’t. And you tell her the way you did when you were younger, _eto ya Princess, only me, don’t cry, you know I never want to make you cry_ , and she says to you like she’s begging, _you can’t stop just because I asked you, you have to do it for you._ And you know nothing you say will be comfort enough to get rid of the matter at hand. She lies there with her face in the pillow. You didn’t do it in front of her but you’ve done it every day she’s been here and you do it almost every day, or you may as well say every day, and she knows that, even without the sight of your arms.

You get barely any sleep, and even inside it’s hot and humid and sticky. _You’re going to kill yourself,_ she cries out almost incoherently, as if she doesn’t even want to bother speaking clearly, like that would make it more real, so you console her the way you did when you were children, because really that was all you were back then even if it didn’t feel like it- _I’m right here, don’t be afraid._ She’ll remember tomorrow. She’s clean now. By definition, that makes you unclean, which is essentially what people have been calling you since you were old enough to understand what it meant to be called things. You know she loves you, but maybe, the both of you have to stay away from each other- maybe being around you would just make her sick again. Maybe if you’d gone with her when you were children your presence would have killed her, just as much as you sometimes fear the marriage would have killed her, would have ended with her overdosing.

You can tell she’s not really asleep from the way she keeps moving around. All night you wonder if she’ll pretend she forgot, or not say anything at all. But she’s not who she was when you were children.

She stares you dead in the eye in the morning, gray circles under her eyes made even more noticeable without her glasses as she sits up in the bed. “Will I see you again,” her voice is tense with what sounds like grief. You have an image of her screaming and crying, no, get the fuck away, if you try and so much as take her hand. It would probably make her think you’re leaving for good if you kiss her again.

You’re not your father. But you were raised by a man who hurt women, and anything else you learned was something you had to figure out on your own. Perhaps it was foolish, arrogant of you to think you’d know how to love a woman without hurting her. You know you never forced her to do anything, and even if other people did those things to you somehow you thought it was always different when it happened to you then when it happened to the other girls, you told yourself, you know you’re no victim but you were raised by someone who created victims and he did his best to raise you as his own and you’re your own person but that own person lived so many years following in step with him and so maybe if there’s two sides in this kind of situation you will always be more like the person who makes victims. Even when you were a small child people said you were violent and they weren’t so wrong. Maybe part of you knew what you were capable of and that’s why you stayed with men who hit you, because you thought you were the exact same as them. You loved her when you were both so young and didn’t know anything, and maybe that hurt her too, maybe you tried to stop her from hurting herself but you wrecked something in her all the same, maybe that’s why you can see, even with her arms healed, her pupils regular, her system clean, her age adult, it’s still you that she loves. 

“You always do, Theodora,” you say, smiling sadly. She closes her eyes for the briefest moment and allows you to hold her, and though she is unable to reciprocate she leans her head against your shoulder.

_

You remember something: waking up, startled and shocked, Kotku’s strong fingers down your throat as she screamed _fuck, wake up,_ and you threw it all up into a basin and with her hands holding your head up she looked you in the eye and asked _Slava what the fuck did you take and how much_ and you thought you’d never seen her look that afraid and you tried to say _little green pills I wasn’t counting_ and she told you _I’ve seen too many people get hurt like this Slava you were overdosing do you know what that means, you would be dead if I hadn’t been here._ And you said you didn’t mean to but you couldn’t laugh about it even though you wanted to because it really felt like what had almost happened. And Kotku was quiet for a second and then told you, sounding kind of distant, _just because you don’t mean to hurt yourself doesn’t mean you can’t get hurt._

And you never told Theodora until you were adults because you didn’t want to tell her then, even if you think she might have guessed, from how you knew all about the hospitals. When it happened all you could think about was her crying and begging you not to die, shoving her fingers down your throat, her holding your head in her hands to check your pupils, dragging you out of a road, using all the force in her little arms to slam shut an open window.

But that was then. There are less pills, and much less blow now. It’s the needle. Maybe this was inevitable. Finding something that feels good, even if it is not so good? Is this not a representation of your life? Almost every day you do it. You know what will happen if not, and it would be worse than the relatively merciful withdrawal Theo went through after Amsterdam. And you know what can happen, and you’re not so sure it wouldn’t get so bad that it wouldn’t drive you to shoot up just to make it stop, and you’d end up accidentally overdosing, the way so many do, and you want to live.

It’s who you are, who you’ve always been, who you were raised to be. It is like that sometimes. Not good or bad, just that it is. And if it makes you feel good that has to mean something. Being alive means being hurt one way or the other, if it is between feeling bad and being hurt, or feeling good and being hurt, that must mean something that you prefer one over the other. _Does it not, Princess, hey?_ You imagine gesturing your hands out, putting an arm around your shoulder, but at this point you think she would blink the tears out of her eyes with completely normal sized pupils and set aside her glass with a few thimblefuls’ worth of liquor in it and push her clean glasses up her nose and swallow back a graceful sob, _don’t make me do this, Slava._

You don’t tell Myriam much about this but she knows. She tells you that she didn’t sign up to be the boss and why do you keep asking her to step in more and more, why you keep leaving her to take charge without notice, is it because you don’t plan on being around much longer, and she knows good doctors, if you want a woman doctor there are certainly many available she knows, she says she will not tell you how to live your life but she will not do nothing to stop you from ending your life. But if you let her, or even asked her, to step in and rescue you, you wouldn’t be able to respect yourself even if she respected you afterwards. The both of you have fought and worked too hard for you to allow her to save you from yourself, as the cliché goes; and you don’t need help, you can’t need help.

You’ve always fucking hated when people say women just become their mothers. You hate the idea that all the terrible things that have happened were in some way your destiny as her daughter, which you feel is the point of the idea that women become their mothers always. Being like your father, sure, you’ve long since accepted that to an extent, he raised you for years. But you are not anything like your mother, and certainly not _entirely_ like her. 

-

Myriam tells you it’s August. You hadn’t been keeping track. You thought it was June. Maybe. You haven’t really thought much about it lately. You don’t want to die. You really don’t. But if you did then it would mean nothing, and you’ve always been aware of that. It wouldn’t mean anything but that didn’t stop you from living. But it wouldn’t mean anything and when you really think about that, isn’t that horrible?

“Hey,” Myriam says. You’re in the private room of a bar together owned by a friend of hers. “Slava. If you need time off to go to a clinic none of us will judge you for it. I can make sure you can go to a great doctor and no one will be able to find you, if you are concerned about it, but really, ever since everything in Amsterdam there aren’t any people who any of us need to worry about.” That’s not it and both of you know it, though. “Any time. Whenever you’re ready.” Her voice is even and deep, like a calm ocean, the way it is when she is trying to say a lot with a little. When she does this she always manages to make herself understood. Maybe it’s because the two of you know each other so well by now, but it’s still how it is.

You look down silently into your drink. Barely, you can see your reflection in it, but not clearly, and you are very small in it. You close your eyes and rest your head in your hand. Myriam looks at you like she really wants to say something she can’t, like it’s stuck in her mouth and she is keeping it trapped.

“I don’t want to just stand by, Slava,” Myriam finally says. “I don’t know what to do, to be honest. No one will have you committed involuntarily, because we care about you. But because we care about you, well, you know what I’m getting at.” She’s quiet for a moment. “You have many people who care about you,” she says. You think you know what she’s saying there.

“When I was younger,” she looks at the ceiling. “I was very sick. I was in the hospital and my father told me _fight it Gulnara, fight it to the death_ because he knew I could die or I could live, but either way, he didn’t want me to resign myself to dying. Maybe it was just words, and no matter how I looked at it, it would have had no bearing on what happened to me.” She takes a shuddering breath, her shoulders going down progressively. “Slava….” She grips your forearm, your sleeve separating her hand from the needle’s bites. “I’m not dead yet. All you’ve been through and you’re not dead either. I know you can survive it.”

You look at her, at a loss for words. She looks at you like she understands your soul.

“Do you want to, Slava?” she says, quietly.

_

“I know how to do it,” Gyuri tells you. You’re not sure how much time has gone by since that conversation with Myriam. You haven’t spoken of it, and she’s said a thing or two to you, but you haven’t continued the discussion, let alone resolved it.

You’re in the backseat of the car, facedown, smiling gently. “I already did,” you say to him, feeling like you’re floating, in an ocean made of angels’ tears of joy, all sparkling and lush like something out of one of those old paintings. You’ve done everything.

“No, no,” Gyuri shakes his head. “I know how to stop.” You close your eyes, understanding. You’ve heard him tell you about Vadim so many times. He tried to quit but couldn’t take the symptoms and went right back to it to make them stop, overdosing.

“No one stops,” you say. “Ah, they stop if they die. But here I am.”

“I know you, Slava. You do not want death.” But you tell him you’re tired and you want to sleep before you talk more and can he drive you home. You wake up in the back of the car in the parking garage, Gyuri still in the front seat, unbuckled, looking back at you.

“Fuck,” you say, trying to sit up, as if in a bed. “You know, Gyuri,” you tell him. “Once, I fucked myself up on coka, really bad time. And I had to stop. I knew I would die if I didn’t. I knew, inside of me. But that was not now.”

“Slava, you must tell me if you really think you can do it. I think you can. But if you are not ready now I will not make you. Will not endanger you more.” You’ve always been in danger, though. That’s always been how it is.

“All right,” you say. “We will do the withdrawal.” Sounds like money. “You know,” you tell him, “sometimes I really did want to stop. But I did not because I thought, no point in doing so.”

“I know,” Gyuri says. You want to go back to sleep. You reach up your sleeve and touch your finger to where the needle entered your arm and remember one day in the pool, Theo looking over all your scars, you explaining them, and then her telling you all about hers, but not showing them all.

You don’t say that you don’t care if it’s safe or not as long as you do it. You don’t say that you still think there’s no point in doing it even if you want to. You don’t say that you are having a great time and you don’t want to do it. None of them are true enough to be real, none of them are false enough to be sufficient lies.

_

A little more than a week later- Gyuri insisted you needed time to recover and you didn’t fight him - you call Myriam over. She starts to say, what have you been up to, what happened in this place, but you just take her by the hands. You let her see you, how worn you are, like you’ve just walked out of your deathbed and survived, but how your eyes show you, at least in the moment, don’t have anything in your system.

“All of it is yours now,” you tell her, and you feel proud of her, and a little of yourself, but mostly her.

“What?” she says. “You cannot just say things like this with no explanation,” she says, and it isn’t the first time she’s said something like this to you.

“I’m done,” you tell her, your jaw set, your face up. “I’m not doing heroin anymore. Like you said. I fought it. Maybe I will have to fight it for the rest of my life, until I die. But I’m off of it.” You see it dawn on her as she exhales.

“Good,” she says, and then some concern in her eyes. “You did not go to the hospital, did you.”

You smile a little. “But I did it,” you tell her, “and I was safe.” Well, in a way. Gyuri would have taken you to the hospital if anything had begun to really go wrong, and the doctors likely would have been able to save you. Maybe they wouldn’t have if something inside you failed. But that didn’t happen, and you didn’t exactly feel safe throughout the whole thing, but you’re not used to being safe. You are used to surviving, for better or worse, and that is what you did.

Myriam closes her eyes for a second. “You really have to be more careful,” she says shaking her head. For a slight second you can see Kotku’s shadow in her and it makes you want to embrace Myriam close, but you know that of course, it isn’t as if you’ll never see Myriam again.

“I am,” you say, realizing that you really are trying to be. “That’s why it’s all yours now. All of it. I am stepping down once and for all. I mean, really, we both know that it has been for a while in all but name while I was fucked up.”

“You were struggling,” Myriam said, “an addiction is something that can take your whole life. You do not have to sound so self deprecating about it.” You know all this. But this is just how you talk about it. You think maybe it would hurt too much otherwise.

“When I first hired you, I did it knowing one day, I would hand it all down to you. You would replace me, I knew, be even better,” you say, maybe feeling a bit dramatic. You put your hand to your heart and then over hers. “You are good, Myriam. You can surpass me. You can be on top of the planet.” Myriam nods like there’s nothing that surprises her about this.

“You mean top of the world,” she says drily. You laugh, not much, but in a way you haven’t in a while. You wonder where the two of you would have ended up without one another, but the thing about what-ifs like that is that very often, you’ll never really know, there’s no way to.

“In your own way,” Myriam tells you, her eyes assessing you as well as ever, as if she knows something you haven’t revealed yet, “I have faith you can, too.”

_

Mr. Hobie has decided to bring the antiques shop into the modern era by giving it webpages. Not one of those sites where you can review the business- you can figure out why, you suppose. But on Instagram (which you sometimes use, not with your real name or face) you manage to find his contact information- telephone and email, and the shop address, which of course you already knew as his home address as well. Hers too. In a way. So you keep in contact with him- calling, texting, commenting on his posts. At least you had been. At first you thought maybe he feared you would do something crazy if he ignored you, or that he felt some kind of obligation to humor you, or that he was too polite to tell you he was angry with you and hated you for what you did to the girl he adopted- not for the theft or the lies, you know he doesn’t place the blame on you, but that it’s your fault people say things about her and it shouldn’t matter, especially the things that are true, but to her, it does, especially the things that are true, so it matters to you that it hurts her. But soon, you find, he seemed to actually enjoy hearing from you, when you were in a state to keep up with him. For a while, you haven’t been. It still kind of surprises you when people take kindly to you- from a young age you were used to being judged by your father, and considered that fair enough, and were all the more grateful for genuine kindness, or at least, for the absence of hatred. You get the sense that maybe Hobie knows a lot of people, talks to a lot of people, but isn’t so close to that many people, not anymore. Maybe you’re like that too in a way, and he recognized it. Sometimes you feel like you aren’t the same person you used to be- which, of course, is an inevitability when time goes by. But you feel like sometimes you notice differences you didn’t anticipate.

One weekend, you’re in New York for a while. It’s too late to go down to the shop, but since you’re in town, you get out your phone and dial the number. After a few rings he picks up. Before he says anything you ask “So, how are things with you and my girl?”

There’s a quiet pause, just a moment. You can hear his breaths. “Oh. Slava. It’s been a while since I’ve heard from you,” and you are again reminded you haven’t actually been by in a while, longer than usual, and it’s later than you usually call, and what he’s saying sounds more like he’s telling you that you took him off guard.

“Have I disturbed you?” you ask, trying to sound pleasant. If you were younger – you try and remember – you would have immediately noticed if you were intruding, but then, you weren’t always good at noticing when you weren’t wanted, even when you had no reason to not be better than you were. You were good. But never as good as you likely should have been. You think, then, that you really don’t know as much about what he does outside of his work.

“No, no,” he clarifies, his voice reassuring, and thoughtful. “I think you should probably come down and talk in person. To talk about what’s going on.”

“Is there a problem?” you wonder what he means, what he isn’t saying, but of course, some things have to be said face-to-face, not over a phone or written and sent. Maybe you’re in some ways American, like Mikhail said, but not in this way, at least, not of this day and age. You were born to a country that no longer exists and hasn’t since the previous century, and now you have no country but the whole world- maybe you have no single time you belong to, either, not past, present, or future.

“Everything will be all right, Slava. I don’t want you to worry. It’s just that a lot has happened,” he says. There is a heaviness to his words, and you can tell that it might be all right soon, but it isn’t quite, or for a while, it wasn’t. A lot has happened with you, too. But you don’t say that. Maybe he can tell, regardless of what he’s been told- he seems to know more than you do.

“I will come whenever you need,” you tell him, “I am in the city now.” He tells you tomorrow, and asks how you’ve been.

“I’ve been here and there,” you say, as if that was what he asked. It’s not a lie. It’s just an answer to another question.

_

You learned to put concealer on your undereye circles years ago. You don’t always do it- sometimes looking rough intimidates people enough that they’ll listen to you, and sometimes looking put-together is the only way they’ll listen to you. The trick is to figure out when to present each face. But you know what to do to make yourself look, as they say, presentable, and you don’t want Hobie to worry about you. He likely has enough to worry about, and you don’t know what to say for yourself, and you don’t think you have any business making people concerned for you. Not anymore. 

If you knew how to do it in your youth- if you’d known which product to shoplift, how to correctly apply it – you wonder if you would have done it for your bruises then, or if you wouldn’t have bothered, just let everyone stare at you and make their assumptions and never ask.

The late November weeks have turned the remaining leaves on the trees a rust color, and the dark branches are beginning to be exposed. Your coat is open and you wish you had thought to bring sunglasses because the sun is bright for this time of year and the air is cool on your hands and someone calls to you _hey sexy_ and you think maybe you are less sick if not everyone thinks you look like you are about to die, but you doubt Myriam or Gyuri or anyone would be amused by this as you are. You could have taken a cab or called Gyuri but some things are to be done alone and sometimes you need to walk somewhere, set aside the time for it.

It takes a few minutes after you give the bell a hard ring and knock the door just to be certain for him to show up. But he does. “Wonderful to see you!” you call loudly before he’s halfway out of the door. He half-smiles, peaceful, but serious.

“Come up,” he tells you, “it’s nice to see you, too”. You don’t look back when you walk inside.

_

“Are you cold?” Hobie asks you and you aren’t sure why until you realize your coat is still on. You get used to wearing coats inside. Sometimes, you like wearing very little, but sometimes, the more you wear, the more effective for whatever it is you’re trying to do.

“No, is all fine with me,” you reassure him, waving your hand. You decide you should ask. “….Is everything fine here?” you aren’t sure why you just lowered your voice.

“As I said. A lot has happened while you were away,” he tells you. You aren’t sure if you should apologize or not, so you don’t say anything. You sometimes do internet searches, and you didn’t hear about the engagement being back on, or anyone from the Barbour family dying, so you assume it doesn’t have to do with any of that.

“I’m here now,” you tell him, “not sure how long. But for some time. If you need help.”

“I don’t need any help,” he says, “but thank you, you’re really very thoughtful. You’ve done a lot for Theodora. I think the both of you have done a lot for each other, and aside from all the trouble,” you hope it has nothing to do with the thefts, “she would want you to visit her.”

“Fuck,” you say without thinking, and you have probably offended him, “she is not in trouble, is she? In the hospital or anything?” She had seemed this time like she wanted to live. But then, he did say everything was taken care of. Although, that can just mean, “it could be worse”. Three days forced in a ward for what they call erratic behavior, then let out. Tube down her throat in a hospital and then a stay in rehab for a bad relapse, caught before she could kill herself.

“Certainly not,” Hobie exhales, as if he’s surprised to hear that. “Nothing like that, thankfully.” But, you think, maybe he has had concerns about things like that too. He wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Sometimes you wonder how much she’s told him. Of course he must know all about the furniture pieces, the painting, much of what happened in Europe. You certainly would never have told your father everything, and he wouldn’t have wanted you to, or expected you to. “After the furniture pieces were all bought back, Theo told me she couldn’t allow me to employ at the shop her any longer. We talked about it and I told her she didn’t have to feel like she couldn’t. But she said it was time for other things. She didn’t want to go back to do more college classes or do more work in antiques. Then she got the job at the magazine for a while, I think you remember some of this, it’s been a while.” He sighs. “The magazine fell through- you know, the magazine business is not what it used to be, I can relate to that all too well- and after that she didn’t know what to do next. The Barbours told her of an opened position at a school. It required a licensing test, and I told her she would do very well.”

“Teaching children?” you ask, not quite sure if you’re understanding, because that definitely does not sound right.

“High school classes, at this prep school along Park Avenue.” Now this is beginning to make more sense. You’re not sure why she did it, but you can imagine her explanations. “You know, she and the Barbours still talk.” You didn’t exactly know this, not the way he does. “Kit said he would put in a good word for her if she decided to apply. It was, you know, the sort of place those sorts of families send their children to.” From his expression, from the way he speaks to you in a tone that suggests he’s relaying something that isn’t so surprising after all, you can tell yours is displaying that you’re getting a very bad feeling. “For a while it went fine.”

“Until it did not,” you say, tentatively, as if providing an answer that was expected of you- _Bohuslava please say the feast day of Saint Adalbert_ \- looking at the wall, where an old print of some kind of autumn landscape watercolor is displayed.

“I think Theodora would like to be the one to tell you the full story, but I think she’d understand if I told you some of it,” he begins.

“Are you sure,” you say, uncertain, not really asking.

“She’s asked if I’ve seen you,” he tells you, restrained. She must have asked more than once, been worried. You nod your head. She has always been better than you believe you deserve, even when she believes she is at her worst. “There was…an incident at the school. A few of the parents complained. There had to be a conference and it…went very badly. She left the position after that. And then soon after she…” he looks down for a moment. “…Got sick. It could have been much worse, but she had to be hospitalized.” You rest your head in your hand, your elbow on the coffee table separating the both of you. _You already left them once, Princess,_ you can imagine yourself telling her, stroking her hair, _you did not have to go back, you did not have to prove anything._ But then, you suppose, you don’t know what happened.

“After that she told me she felt she wanted to be away from New York for a while. Maybe she needed to be gone again. She said she hadn’t felt so good in years, when she was traveling.” You remember how she’d told you about that, how you’d met up when she traveled that year- at first all that traveling alone made her afraid and nervous until she realized she’d spent her life afraid, so many things had already happened to her, what else did she have left to be afraid of? And so she walked the streets at night and went places she wasn’t familiar with because no one was stopping her and she was free and it might not have been safe but the world never world be. She’d always been both nervous and reckless. That year, she was neither- she didn’t confine herself and didn’t try to destroy herself. You can see her halfway around the world learning a new language, starting a new life, in a place where no one will call her bad names or judge her by others’ judgments of her or know her name from newspapers.

“Is she abroad?” you ask. That would be typical. Right when you are here, she is anywhere else.

“Many New Yorkers would consider out-of-state abroad,” Hobie tells you, as if making a joke. You laugh a little. “Have you ever been to Massachusetts?” he asks. A few times, actually, but never for long. “She’s by the ocean. Not in the city.” You remember California, then. Running to the ocean and staying for a time. Running to somewhere, not just running forever, not like you.

“Tell me where to go,” you tell him, and you think you almost sound like you are confessing something to him.

_

You take the train to Boston and from the chaotic, mazelike station you get on a bus that takes you into a town called Hyannis and another bus that takes you to your destination, a town called Mashpee.

It feels like you’ve been traveling forever once you get off the bus. (Cape Cod: quite a market for antiques, Hobie had told you.) You’ve been on much longer commutes- perhaps this just feels longer because of the circumstances. The air around you is cool, and has the kind of fluid breeze that always is in towns by the sea. You cannot see the ocean, but can hear seagulls. You’ll probably have to walk down some highway, but that’s fine, you’ve done much more dangerous things in the name of getting from one place to another.

You walk by an almost vacant parking lot, and see some kids on a bench who might be fifteen, sixteen. A girl with blonde hair and a huge gray sweatshirt that says _New England VS. Everyone_ , and a dark-haired girl in a rain jacket, both of them with thick eyeliner, sharing a fast food bag. “We forgot our ID’s,” says the blonde girl as she sees you. The dark-haired girl giggles a little. “Can you buy us some beer?” You stare for a moment and wonder if you ever looked that young. 

“I am not from here, sorry,” you tell them, your accent as proof, “I have no ID.” And it’s true, at least, you certainly don’t have identification for this state. All you have today, you think, is your Zelenko passport. You keep walking and can hear the girls laughing, trying to throw fries into each other’s mouths, saying they can’t wait for winter vacation to come so they can just do this and hang out and do nothing every day.

_

By the time you find the street, it really hasn’t been so long. Maybe not much longer than an hour, and not so long on the highway- you went by a lot of trees and woods, more than you expected to see here, like a wall on one side of you, the highway on the other side. It’s like so much of what you’ve seen so far of Cape Cod. No skyscrapers, some old motels that reminded you of highways leading to and from Vegas, some small businesses, some chain stores you’ve never heard of, some gas stations. Her house is on a quiet street, and you can imagine in the spring and summer, the trees must almost block out the sun. Her house is a dark blue color in a street near enough to the highway you can probably hear the cars, one floor, and you can see a light is on. It is a Saturday and she is staying in- once you would have said, _Princess, not every moment has to be working on furniture or lying around miserable, have some fun!_ Maybe this isn’t so surprising. Or maybe it is, maybe she likes to go out again and you haven’t been present enough to notice. In Antwerp when she’d confided in you about all the men she’d been with up until her engagement you wondered at first if she was lying (She’d groaned and slammed her head back against the pillow, starting off a little sarcastic; “fuck, Slava, I’m not. Without you to follow around 24/7 I learned to deal with being all alone in other ways.” She shrugged a little, looked away. “I thought for so long I was so disgusting that it made me feel better when guys actually wanted to spend any time with me. I’d wake up the next day and all these people at college would be mad because I was with someone’s boyfriend, or these Park Avenue types would say I _had a past_ because they were just _too refined_ to call me the names kids in Vegas would call us. Maybe sometimes these guys and I used each other. But it made me feel almost normal.”)

So you walk forward and knock on the door a few times, using all the force in your hand. And there she is, after a moment, staring at you in quiet disbelief, if that’s what it is, her glasses at the end of her nose. You wonder if she’ll be angry with you for staying distant, if she’ll tell you she’s trying to stay clean and you should leave and didn’t you see the flyers about the opioid crisis in Boston and every other town in this state, there’s no place for you here, if she’ll just slam the door, if she’ll tell you she didn’t come all the way up here to have a whole town talking about how bad she is all over again, she’ll never sink to your level no matter how much you try and drag her down. But none of that seems to be happening. She was always more patient with you than anyone else would be. _Don’t leave me_ , she’d always plead with you, but she’s always the one who leaves. Maybe that says just as much about you than it does about her. “Where have you been,” she asks you, her voice like exhaling. You think for a moment you’ve upset her. You sometimes wondered in the past, if she’d see you again, if all she’d be able to see is the drugs, and maybe you would have understood if she did. Every time you saw some sign advertising a Narcan hotline or _what to do in case of an overdose_ you felt like you were seeing something very intrinsic about yourself revealed, and you felt like you were understanding something very plainly about the rest of the world that you had neglected to comprehend before.

You were wrong. You don’t crave it now. You did for a while but with every day it got more distant behind you and eventually, you thought it just wasn’t worth it. When you said you would crave it all your life, you thought you would, and you were really trying to say something else, even if you didn’t quite understand it. People say and do things when their minds are altered. Doesn’t always mean they don’t mean it at all, but sometimes they don’t. You didn’t lie, but you were wrong. And you hope with all your being she doesn’t crave it either, and she never will again. 

You smile at her. “You are directly across country from California. Maybe we are doing the opposite of what we always thought we would do, Princess, and that is what being adults meant?” and before she can do anything you embrace her and you can feel her doing it back, her grip stronger than she looks like she’d have the will to do. Because she still looks so shy, like she is even more delicate inside, with her languid movements and nervous, wide eyes. Her hair is halfway pulled back with a satiny ribbon and she is wearing a thick, soft sweatshirt with a hem that goes down to her thighs. 

When it ends she takes a shaky breath, like she is about to cry, but she doesn’t, and she looks at you and steps back a little, gesturing for you to come in. “I take it Hobie told you where I was.” From what you see of the house it is small, but when you think about it, a small house is like an apartment.

“I did ask him,” you clarify. She nods to herself.

“Well, he didn’t tell me you’d be coming,” she says, her voice a little tight, “but neither did you.” She’s quiet for a moment and you wonder if she didn’t want you to come. Or if she can’t stand to face you. “I anticipated it. In the way you wait and wait for something to happen even though you know it probably won’t.” Or maybe she can face you- you feel sometimes every time you meet with her again, she gets more open, more truthful. You’re not sure if you are. Maybe you were your most truthful as a child, who lied to yourself, but who always let the truth speak for itself in the moment, and didn’t bother to hide it when it was happening.

“Fuck,” you say to her. “I am sorry. I really am, Theodora.” You don’t know how to tell her about what’s been happening with you. Maybe you’re the one who’s trapped in the past, who never advanced past not telling her about the full extent of what you saw from your father and from what happened to you when he was gone and you had no one but strangers, who laughed about almost dying and talked about seeing others’ deaths like it was nothing.

She shakes her head, puts a hand to her forehead. “No. I could have contacted you, too.” The silence stands between you. “Wait. Slava,” she begins, “I don’t see Gyuri’s car outside…” she looks at you for a moment.

“I swear to you no one knows enough to follow me,” you reassure her, your hand on your chest. Gyuri and Myriam know where you are, they’re just not coming along. “I come alone, with no friends but with that means no enemies know where I am. Everything is perfectly safe.” You take her by the shoulder. Part of the reason why you kept your distance is you never want to put her in danger again. You never want her to have to fire a gun and you never want her to be on the other end of one. Or worse. Sometimes you are awake at night thinking of what could have happened in Amsterdam had been handled worse, what could have happened to her if she ended up in the wrong people’s hands.

“No,” she says, “I mean how did you get here?”

“The bus,” you tell her, “before that, the train from that city you hate so much, actually very easy for me to get used to-” (You used to think she only hated it because of her friend who died, but maybe it also has to do with the art thefts; you once told her “we are the reason why they got their artifacts back” and she said, “maybe just a day trip, if that”.)

“Are you telling me you fucking walked to this house from the bus station? Along the highway?” she raises her voice.

You gesture to yourself. You do look rather imposing. “Hitchhikers do not take me,” you say, half-smiling. Not that you ever see people hitchhike anymore. Maybe drivers here don’t take them so much anymore. Maybe you’re not from anywhere but you know this country well enough to see when things change. You came here first, when, the beginning of the twenty-first century? Maybe it was the new, in-development, part of America that gave you the American part of you. The part that no one realized would exist ten years earlier, the part that maybe shouldn’t have existed if things had gone differently, the part that ended up going differently because already so early in this century the times are changing and then changing again, the part that was new and convinced of its own settled permanence as Vegas. 

“That’s not fucking funny, Slava,” and you want to agree with her, but sometimes, as they say in America, it is what it is. You remember your own hitchhiking days with a sort of empty feeling. Nothing to be done about the past. “The drivers in this state. All of them are fucking maniacs,” she shakes her head, “the worst I’ve ever seen. You could have been run down by any one of them.” You do have to admit, some of them were a bit too fast.

“We used to walk along the highway,” you say, “I know you remember that.”

She closes her eyes. “I always remember things. You know that,” she says almost resentfully, like you’ve cornered her into admitting it. _But you do not_ you could say. But you know what she means. “Teaching these kids…I think about it a lot. They’re our age when… What we did to ourselves. What was done to us.” She’s looking at the floor, like she’s deep in concentration on what to say and doesn’t want to be distracted. “After I left- when I first went back to New York- I would worry so much. There were days I worried you died,” she says, and you are not surprised, but she says it like she’s been keeping it a secret from the world for years. “I thought, what if you overdosed, or your father hit you too hard, or some sick person saw you all by yourself and you couldn’t get your way out of it. I thought you could disappear and no one would ever find you. I thought sometimes it could have been either of us. Both at once, maybe. Every time I heard something like that.”

Sometimes all you can do is say what comes to you, and this is one of those times. So you move closer to her and put two fingers underneath her chin gently so she will actually look at you. “Right now,” you tell her, “I have been better, much better, than in a long while.” You don’t want to speak for her even though somehow you think she isn’t worse, or at least, not as bad as she may think. Her dark complexion is tinged with pink and her teeth are clenched, like when she is about to cry, but she doesn’t this time, and though her eyes are wet nothing comes out aside from a gaze like she is hoping you are being truthful this time.

“Yeah,” she asks softly, and you shake your head, yes. “Maybe I am too,” she says, “sometimes I’m not sure. But sometimes I just go through the day and only later does it occur to me to think about it. And that’s when I feel like I’m approaching some kind of normalcy. Believe it or not.”

“That is good,” you tell her. You think she should stop worrying about whatever _normal_ is, but you will not argue over words right now.

“Hobie didn’t tell you what happened,” she says. The sun, by now, has set. “I’m surprised you didn’t already ask.”

“I was getting there,” you tell her. You wonder for a moment if she was implying you didn’t care or notice something was going on. “If you are not ready to talk of it, fine. But you can. You know you always can, of course?”

She inhales, long and hard, like she’s at the doctor’s office being instructed to demonstrate breathing. “The school did an assembly,” she begins. “You know, how like we used to have?” You vaguely remember the whole class with the rest of the school crowded into the gym on the bleachers for some talk you barely listened to and you kept trying to pinch Theo’s arm to make her laugh during it and no one was paying attention. “This anti-drug talk.” she says it as if talking about some awful event that nonetheless was done with and couldn’t be helped. Her jaw sets a little and she looks away for a second. “Yeah,” she says even though you didn’t say anything. “This is what it was about.” You look at her and wait to continue and hope she sees sympathy in your face.

She almost laughs a little, short and bitter. “Afterwards I had a class to teach. I didn’t think the lecture was very helpful or informative. It was very, you know, 1980s “just say no,” didn’t really differentiate between one thing or another, made people out to be the worst for just being sick. All this it could never happen _here_ tone to it even though half those kids’ parents would go and do blow in ballrooms like it was champagne.” This last part, said in a snapping tone like a shot. She closes her eyes for a second, shaking her head. “So I tried to just talk to them about it, get their thoughts, to clear some things up. They hired me to teach them so that’s what I was doing. I just…” she’s looking at her shoes the way she sometimes does when she doesn’t want to be somewhere – when you met with Spirsetskaya for your partners’ project and she asked like she knew and now you realize she clearly did, _aside from the projects, girls, is everything okay in your lives?_ ; when you were on the bus and the girls in the seat behind you were loudly whispering _wait shh the Russian bitch and that weird girl are in front of us, actually she’s not Russian, what is she then, they’re both from the Island of Lesbos;_ when she was at the engagement party looking like she wanted to disappear and you heard someone who probably didn’t even care about her tell her _this is the most radiant I’ve ever seen you._ But she is voluntarily telling you this. She wants to be here. It’s the past she doesn’t want to return to. That, you suppose, is a step forward. But maybe sometimes you have to look back to understand where it is you’re headed to.

You put a hand on her wrist. When you were children neither of you were ever so careful. Maybe in a sense you were both more honest then, if not in your words. “You can say it,” you tell her. “It is over. Cannot hurt you.”

She smiles at you ruefully. “You know what I did next, Slava. I told those kids what I was. I mean, I didn’t get too graphic. But I told them I was an addict. I told them about how I took pills every day when I was younger than they were, and how I started heroin and almost killed myself. And I told them I survived. It was hard and I might not have lived through it but I did.” You aren’t surprised that the story went in this direction, but if you hadn’t been listening to the rest of it, you would have. Maybe you’re not the same people anymore, or at least, she isn’t the same person. “They were, you know. Kids are kids. And these were the real Park Avenue royal children. They hadn’t heard people talk about this kind of thing like that before. So they were kind of surprised but they were respectful, at least to my face. And I guess I made such an impression that some of them told their families.” She puts a hand to her forehead.

“Fuck,” you tell her, shaking your head, gripping her wrist a bit tighter than you were before.

“You can say that again,” she intones. “The school didn’t fire me. They might not have. It was just that those parents _expressed concern_ to the point where the school thought it would be a good idea to have this conference.” You immediately know that this is worse than outright being fired. She bites her lip a little. “So it starts out and I’m explaining myself. I’m kind of nervous.” Probably more than kind of, you think. “And, you know, no pills to help me through, though now that I mention it I’m sure they were thinking I put a whole pharmacy down my throat. These parents, it’s only a couple of them. There were a few more people concerned but not everyone came in. It’s just that they’re so _calm_. Like they’ve done things like this before. But they say these things that are like, _as a self-admitted suicidal heroin addict with such a …torrid personal life, is this really a responsibility you can handle_. All this shit clearly meant to get at me and fine, it works. “Once a junkie, always a junkie” bullshit. _I don’t see how telling them horror stories about the opioid crisis will help them._ Yeah, I’m sure you don’t. I say to them, maybe I’m a little sharp about it, well, I know enough about _here_ to know that recreational use of cocaine is common enough among maybe not _you_ but certainly your peers for these kids to have access to it. So one of them says, I don’t think _you_ have the authority to judge my decisions as a mother, and the other says yes, maybe we can talk about that, _Miss Decker,_ because I’m told that during your engagement you would be known to behave erratically, not to mention what else happened with that, and that really wasn’t so long ago.” Her voice is like acid; she’s attempting to mimic the cool, effortless tone of the sort of people she used to spend her days with. But you can tell she doesn’t talk about any of that time very much with anyone. “This is where I just kind of began losing it….I started saying, is that what all this is about? And they acted all shocked, like I set something on fire. So I said, people have been spreading rumors about me as long as I can remember, and I don’t care what you have to say, just say it. And the headmaster says to me, _calm down, Theodora,_ so I said, maybe you people would actually deal with any of your problems if you weren’t insisting everyone had to be calm all the time. I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have said, really lost control of myself and used some language they certainly didn’t use. But they said things about me too.” She gives you a meaningful look, like she expects you to know. “It got really fucking ugly…I hate remembering it,” she sighs, her breath shaky, the words to recount some of the exchange not ready to come out yet. “In the end I stood up and told them, you’re right, I don’t fucking belong here and I know exactly what I am, you don’t need to tell me what I already know. I said if it wasn’t the drugs it would have been something else, and I’m certainly no one’s mother but as someone who was let down by a lot of adults as a kid I sure hope someone teaches your kids you can’t just pretend things will go away if you act like they’re not there. I told them I was done spending every day feeling worthless just because I was surrounded by people who thought I was. So that was done. They didn’t fire me. They would have, probably right then, had I not done their job for them and left.” You want to be proud of her and tell her she was right and she showed them, but you get the feeling that with the distance of time, it feels like a victory. You can tell that when it happened it didn’t look or feel much like standing up for herself. Still, the things she said to them- she wouldn’t have said that when you first knew her, or when you found her again, or even soon after Antwerp. You wonder if she knows how much she’s freed herself from being chained to the wall of the past.

“So yeah,” she gives a mirthless laugh, “that was another very fucked-up conversation with Kit. We’re really good at lying to his mother. Partners in crime.”

“Do you still talk to him?” You ask, curious. You wonder how much he knows about you.

She shrugs. “Sometimes, yes. We’re on much better terms than we ever were when we were going to be married. Before I left New York he told me he was sorry how everyone in the neighborhood was toward me, and that it took him so long to notice. I told him I wasn’t angry with him and I wished the best for his family. He told me something: I know you’ll be all right, he said.” It wouldn’t have worked out, you think, but now that both of them realize that, you suppose, it’s much better. You’re happy for both of them, him included, you think- some people don’t realize that sometimes you can’t just do what seems right, that it often isn’t.

You smile at her a little. “So things are good with the family.” Well, that’s one thing you haven’t ruined, but then, if you did ruin whatever bond she had with that family, it wouldn’t all be because of you.

She looks down and inhales. “Yeah. Well, Em and Kit are over so at least I don’t have to see her over there or hear about her. They all say to me I’m welcome in their home any time, and Mrs. Barbour is doing a lot better…” She looks at you, like you’ll understand what she’s telling you. “I tried to give Kit back the ring, I said I didn’t feel right holding into it. But he told me he bought it for me, that it suited me, and it wouldn’t be any more right for me to give it to him so it could be the ring he gives to another woman one day. I began to tell him that I didn’t know what to do with it and I didn’t want to pawn it, but he just looked at me and took my hand and said he knew when I was ready it would be right. He said the day we argued and he said he _knew all about my things_ , he was wrong, he didn’t know everything about me then, and he supposes sometimes doing what you should do isn’t what you’re _supposed_ to do. I tried to say something about how I didn’t know what he was talking about but…I couldn’t. I couldn’t anymore. All we did together was lie and I guess we were both finally done with it.”

You think about the meaning of all that for a moment. You wonder if she has the ring in this house right now. What would she say, you wonder, if you told her to bring it with you when you go to Las Vegas. If you asked her if she’d be happier getting married more privately, not some big high-society event, but quickly in Vegas, making peace with your past there by showing you survived it together, survived to make it back and not be afraid. If she wouldn’t mind going around with it on, if the inevitable questions wouldn’t be an unfair burden for her. If she knows you don’t think that staying away from people you love really helps anyone survive, anymore.

“So if you are done with lying, does it mean you know everything about you now?” You smile at her, but it’s a real question you mean.

She puts a hand to her head, nodding. Almost in a whisper she says, “I think so.”

“And things are good with Red?” you ask. You got a good feeling from him, like he would be a good friend.

Theo sighs a little. “Yeah. I think we’re finally getting to know each other even if it took us a while.” She shakes her head. “Better late than never, I suppose.”

“But anyway,” Theo continues raising her head, “Mrs. Barbour to my knowledge still has no idea about what happened, I guess complaining about me to her face is still a step too far for these people. She always wanted a daughter. Even from how she talks with me in letters and things like that now. Isn’t that funny?” No, it really isn’t, but then, maybe that’s why she finds it funny, always laughing at the wrong time, even now.

“Hobie said,” you say tentatively, “that you were sick?” you ask her this the way you used to, in your youth, when you would wake up in the morning after she was ill, _Princess will you be okay here in bed if I go get more cough drops?_

She sighs. “Soon after that I got this, infection? I realized what it was because I felt sick and looked up my symptoms. Yes,” She isn’t looking at you but she raises her hand in anticipation of your interruption, “I’m fine now. And it wouldn’t have been that bad if I had just gone to a doctor in the beginning but I- I….” she puts a hand to her face. “I knew for what it was they would have offered me Oxy and I didn’t trust myself so I just didn’t do anything. It hurt so much. All I did was lie in bed. It got to the point where Hobie noticed something was wrong and called an ambulance.” She sounds like she’s going to cry and you want to comfort her but you know she wants to finish, and she doesn’t want to get to a point where she needs that. She exhales, shaky and long. “I guess after they let me out of the hospital I realized I needed a break from the city. I was happy when I was traveling. I hadn’t realized that could happen.”

“I want for you to have happiness no matter where you are,” you tell her. You always have wanted that for her.

“I think,” she says, breathing steadier now, “being where I am is good. I don’t feel like everyone wants me gone. Sometimes when I’m at work I see the students and…I don’t know. I feel like I can understand myself at that age better. I can forgive.” She smiles a little, just barely noticeable. But you notice.

_

When you take a shower in her bathroom you notice a long line of products in the cabinet behind the mirror, the way Xandra once did. Lipsticks and foundations, a sizable assortment; some anti aging cream. Does she think she looks old or unattractive, the way she used to be so insecure? You want to come out and joke to her, _if you think you are old then what does that make me, Princess?_ But maybe there’s something to it. The both of you will be thirty soon enough. Certainly the idea of either of you making it this far wasn’t quite expected, so of course it feels like being old to her, and it feels like being old to you maybe you’re not too wrong because in a way you have aged, possibly beyond your years. You always joked about dying as a child but never actually wanted to, but also, you never at that time conceived of yourself as a future adult the way young people are expected to here. And you aren’t sure if you thought of yourself as a child when you were.

_

“I want to ask something of you,” you say when you’re in her room, and wrapped in one of her bathrobes, something like a soft coat, reaching the ground, even though you are taller than she is. (She’d sighed, “come on, Slava, I’m not going to make you sleep on that tiny couch, it’s fine, the bed is big enough for two people,” you didn’t tease her by asking if there’d ever been more than one person in it before at a time). You raise one finger, “and you do not have to say yes. Although I would not be unhappy if you did say yes. I just want you to know of it.”

Theo nods. “Of course,” she says, “tell me. I think we have to tell each other things.” She exhales. “I think you should tell me where you’ve been.”

You look ahead of you at the wall for a moment. Soft blue on the walls, like a sweater worn in winter, the sort of shade that makes coldness seem peaceful. Even more products and tubes on her dresser, cream and pink and silver packaging, and a few different kinds of combs. Photographs: Popchyk in a little sparkling frame shaped like a paw; her and her mother in front of a Christmas tree (“I was twelve there,” she said, and she sounded happy to remember, and her mother was wearing the emerald earrings you’ve seen on her daughter many times after); a polaroid of her mother much younger in another era’s New York with neon eyeshadow; Theo wearing an open overcoat and a short white and gray toile-print dress, smiling wanly next to Hobie in front of the store (“yeah, college was a weird time for me, I look zoned out in every picture from then,” she said, but you also see Hobie’s hand protectively on her shoulder); a couple faded photographs with the date, 1978, timestamped on it, people who you think must be her grandparents with the horses.

(Once in your old room Theo saw an old photograph, the size of the palm of your hand, faded and wrinkled. A small girl in messy braids, lighting a candle in a church, her head downcast. She looked so much like you but you wouldn’t recognize her if you didn’t know. But “that’s you, isn’t it,” was what Theo had said.)

(She always lamented people said she looked like her father but you never really got it. Hints of him, but not the whole image. Sometimes you could see it but you never told her. An expression or something. The way her mouth looked when it turned a certain way. You get it. No one ever said you looked just like your father but you were often told you were similar- you held your drink like him, you knit your eyebrows like him. You don’t think about it much. You hope she doesn’t worry about it much anymore either.)

“I will,” you say, looking at her. You’re both too old now for you to tell yourself you can’t tell her about your life because that will protect her somehow. The room is quiet for a moment, and you hear it is raining outside. “What I am saying is that soon it will be ten years since my father died,” you tell her, your voice matter-of-fact, almost like a lawyer going over fees, and you didn’t intend that. You realize you never told her, even though you said you would, about how it happened.

She opens her mouth like she’s about to say something, but doesn’t for a moment, until she does. “Ten fucking years,” she breathes, shaking her head, and you think she’s thinking about how, everything back there for her is even longer ago than that. “Are you all right?”

You nod. “Yah. I am. Is just…ten years anniversary. I should visit his grave. Have not been since. Have not been to Vegas in so long.”

“Oh,” she says, massaging one eyelid with her hand the way she does when she’s getting a migraine. “I understand.”

“Only for a weekend,” you promise, trying to sound reassuring. “Then right back to your work. Certainly the school will allow you to go if you miss no days.” She is nodding her head. You’re almost surprised, but then, that year with the antiques, all she did was short trips, all around the world, and then back, simple as a walk down the street for ten minutes of errands.

“What about your work…” she begins suspiciously, tentatively.

You look at her plainly. “It’s all Myriam now. My day is over,” you tell her. “But that is fine. Some things must end. There is time for me to tell you more later.” She nods, looks away.

“I kept thinking that year I’d have to go there for some fraud piece,” she says after a while. “Or that after, someone’s, I don’t know, destination wedding or something would be there.” You have heard that Philip and his British girlfriend Sarah have amiably broken up and even if they hadn’t, they probably wouldn’t have chosen a Las Vegas chapel, and neither would any of the Barbours; though maybe that’s the kind of thing the two of you would have planned if it was legal when you were together in Vegas, but you don’t say that. “I’d have to go there eventually, I kept thinking. But…” her hand is next to her mouth, thoughtful. “I’d go with you,” she says, “if I go at all.”

You give her a little smile, like you used to when you would both start to feel better after being sick- hey, is not so bad after all, Princess?

“I was with Xandra,” you begin, and she looks confused for a minute, like you’re saying you recently saw Xandra; “and the television news was on and she tells me I have to come and see. And the reporter is saying, missing Ukrainian businessman, Volodymyr Pavlikovksy, but he is not pronouncing it right and I keep thinking that every time he repeats the name for everyone watching. Missing man, last seen three days ago, reported by colleagues, call this number with information. That is how I learned he returned from Australia and came back here after all. So I immediately get phone and ask all these questions but they have nothing, maybe they just say that because it is over phone and I cannot prove that way I am his daughter. At first I think maybe he just ran off drunk and they did not look hard enough. But no news, and then I understand, he is dead. Later, house is searched, he is dead in there all along, most likely stroke.”

Theodora stares at you, completely speechless, her hand still at her mouth. In that vintage-looking nightgown of hers she could be an Old Hollywood actress, the ingenue in a noir wakes from her bed at midnight to see the shocking crime outside her window.

“I know,” you tell her. “’Most likely.’ American science cannot even tell me for certain.”

“I used to think you were out of your mind for saying he loved you and you loved him,” she says. “I mean, I’ll be honest with you. He was a horrific individual and I wish you didn’t have to live with him. But now, looking back, I can’t judge a kid for thinking the way you did. If you ever felt like you couldn’t talk about certain things about him with me, I hope that you didn’t feel judged. I'm sorry. Being young is, I don’t know. You try to make sense of things and can’t always know how to do it.” She pauses for a moment. “Our dads are probably both in the same cemetery,” she says, “I guess I’ll see mine too. I don’t know. Closure. Something like that.” You think you know what she means.

You extend your hands out. “All this apologizing even now,” you say, “you do not have to, Theodora.” She smiles sadly at you, just barely noticeable. “For years he was all I had and I was all he had. That is…it must be remembered,” you think that might be the best way to put it. It was never easy to put it in words.

“And then we were all we had,” she says, which you didn’t expect, even if you were thinking it. She is looking down at the bedspread, silent for a long moment, and you wonder what she is preparing herself to say.

“I still have some of my mom’s ashes,” she says quietly, looking at her hands. “I did inter some of the ashes with Andy in New York years ago. But I couldn’t do it all. It would have felt like getting rid of her. All these years and I haven’t done it. But I think I’m ready to do it now. I’m going to go to Kansas and bury her- her remains, with her parents. Down by Coldwater, it’s in Comanche County. I have my plane ticket for early next month.” She says this slowly, but not with timidity or uncertainty. She knows what she is doing and she is prepared and even looking forward to it. You think her mother would be proud of her. You feel like you remember these place names from high school, her telling you under her breath one night when you were both supposed to be asleep. She says it with deliberation and only when she’s finished does she look back up to you, her eyes looking tired, but not quite as deathly tired as you’ve seen her before.

“When you do,” you say, “tell me about it if you like.” She nods a little, putting her hand on yours.

“I’m glad that – at least I think –“ there’s a slight, possibly unintentional bitterness in her voice when she says it, “both of us are, you know. Trying to make things right for ourselves now.” She doesn’t ask, doesn’t accuse. But you assume, she can tell something is new.

You nod. “Is not quite official right now, though it may as well be,” you begin, “but it’s all Myriam’s now. I chose her for that reason, you know. Because one day, I tell her when we first begin working together, I may not be around. So that is why she must be my right hand. She showed me the strength I needed, you know, the independence in that world.” Theo is silently looking at you, blinking once as you finish. “I mean to say, that is not my work anymore.” You should find something new. You know you can’t just live off that reward money forever. “So I am as they say, between jobs. I am thinking of nightclub management. Seriously.” You really think you could do it, and do it well.

“That…that’s really good.” Theo nods, but she’s still quiet, aside from that, like she’s still processing it. When you were children sometimes you didn’t say things, but you weren’t always silent the way you become as adults sometimes; you’d ask with wild eyes the sorts of questions you only speak aloud when you’re fifteen. She once asked you, as you chased each other around the living room couch and laughed and laughed, if you ever thought there was anything wrong with her. Her, and not you. Her, and not her life, anything that happened to her.

“It was Gyuri,” you say then. “He told me, I did not have to go to a hospital. I was so afraid I kept saying, please no hospitals, no doctors. I was out of my mind, had taken some really bad shit, and the next day when it was mostly out of my system he said if I really wanted to stop I could do it and he would be there and make sure nothing happened to me.” You laugh a little. “Well, of course a lot was happening. But he meant, in case an organ went or something of the sort. My poor Fyodora. I knew why you were so sick in Antwerp even before you told me.” Her eyes wide, she looks downward. “But this, was something else. Seven months, and nothing since. I do not want to go back to that country, if you know what I am saying.” You swallow, put a hand to your head. “It is a miracle I am thankful for, truly, Theodora, your withdrawal was not what mine was.” _And that you were not there to see it_ , you do not add. You put your hand over your heart. Her eyes are wide with anxiety and compassion. You would touch her, but you are not sure if she wants this, even now.

What you remember is Gyuri gently placing you in a bathtub and telling you, this is just like everything else in world, it gets worse before it gets better, and you remembered your last days in Vegas. And at first you just lay in there with a pillow and threw up a few times and shivered. Then you were constantly running the tap to clean yourself up because you got even sicker, but you couldn’t get yourself out so you always had to be under the cold water and you’d cry out but then you’d make the hot water too hot and when you were done you were immediately freezing in the empty bathtub and Gyuri had to give you towels to wrap yourself up in. At one point you were so out of it you began screaming _the window_ and reaching out of the bathtub towards the wall, screaming and crying it again and again, and you don’t know how many languages you said it in. But Gyuri put his hands on your shoulder and knelt down next to you and told you, _Slava, you are here in my home. There is no window in this room. Okay? Do you see?_ And you looked, and didn’t see it, and you were so tired but you hadn’t slept for the past two nights and knew you wouldn’t sleep that night either. Either fucking way, you thought, it would kill you- you would go back to it and eventually die, or you would call someone and ask them to bring some for you and you’d overdo it because you felt so bad and you’d OD, or you would stay in this bathtub and you body wouldn’t be able to take it anymore. On the last worst day, when you couldn’t even move your arms to the tap of the bathtub, and you felt like you could barely breathe and you could feel every heartbeat like an actual beating, you vaguely remember, like a dream, telling Gyuri you were sorry about Vadim, and he put his arm around your shoulder and leaned against you, on the floor, separated by the bathtub, and said he knew you were, and soon, this would all be done. And in the moment you wondered if that meant you were dying, or if you were about to come out of it alive.

“I love you,” she says, staring ahead at the wall. You know this, of course, and have always felt you do not deserve it, and she deserves better than the fact that you of all people love her in return when you know none of those New York boys do. But maybe, you think, she hasn’t wanted that for years. _I love you too_ almost seems insultingly insufficient.

“….You know that I do as well, yes?” you reach across the table to take her hand. “Please tell me you know.”

“I think,” she says carefully, “I used to not think anyone could love me. But now. I don’t think I’m like that anymore,” she nods her head, her hands clasped together on her lap. Her long hair loose over her shoulders, her glasses almost hanging off her nose. You are both so close to one another, you don’t know why you haven’t put your arm around her already, but you do, carefully but not very slow. Sometimes when she was so reserved in the past, it wasn’t because she didn’t want you, but because she couldn’t allow herself to want you. Healing something like that, the of pain deep inside, was something you could help, but not force. 

“We don’t have to do anything you do not want,” you tell her, and you mean that in every way that can be taken. You always said that in Vegas. Now, she nods her head, silently, sniffling a little.

“No, I want to go to Vegas with you, I want you around. We’re not doing anything I don’t want,” she says, and is quiet for a moment. “And I’m glad it was you. I mean. I’m glad the first person I ever …. Was with, was you. Someone who cared about me and treated me well and, and loved me, and wanted me, and didn’t cause harm. And-” her voice breaks a little. “I know I wasn’t the first time for you. I know we were both-” she takes a deep, shaking breath. “I know we’ve both experienced certain things like that, that were very wrong, aside from everything else we went through that we shouldn’t have had to experience. And we never really talked about it.” _I never said no,_ insists your voice from more than ten years ago. She’s talking about a lot of things, you know, but some things you never got to talk about. “But- I hope I gave you what you gave me, I hope I was the first time it wasn’t hurting you.” It takes you a moment for your mind to process part of what she’s saying- that you did no harm to her. You have to sniff because your nose is starting to run and you realize, you don’t think either of you have ever cried together like this.

As you draw her in close to you she puts her head into your neck and you can feel her face is all wet, and you tell her, _yes, yes of course_ , not knowing what else to say because even now how could she ever think otherwise, and she chokes out, _what happened- the things that were done to us as kids- that wasn’t our fault, not mine and not yours, not any of it,_ and you whisper like some kind of confession, not even disagreeing with her, just telling her and smiling sadly, _I almost never said no_ , and for a moment she just cries wordlessly, for the both of you, and maybe all the lost girls in the world like the two of you used to be, maybe with the exhaustion of it all being over. “Sometimes I was too afraid to say no or fight back but that doesn’t mean it was my fault or my own doing if someone hurt me,” she tells you, when she can, and you know she’s really saying it wasn’t your fault either. It wasn’t only about fear for you, but sometimes it was – you just didn’t always think or couldn’t always accept that it was.

For a while you just lie there holding each other like it’s four in the morning in Desert End but both of you are awake and safe and not thinking of dreams but talking of your lives. It is the other side of the country, over ten years later, and you can do what you want with your lives now. You both have your lives now – if only yourselves at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen knew this.

“I think I want to go to sleep soon,” says Theodora, after a long, shaky breath, “I don’t mind if you stay up, please just don’t have the TV on too loud-”

“I’m right here,” you tell her, having seen there is no television in the room and getting what she’s meaning. “Okay?” When you say the word _okay_ it still comes out accented after all these years.

“Yeah,” she says quietly, after a moment, slipping underneath the comforter and reaching to turn the light off, “yeah. Good night, Slava,” she says.

“Spokoynoy nochi,” you say in her ear, kissing her cheek, the two of you lying on your sides facing one another. _I want to show you the ocean,_ she murmurs, half asleep, _take you around, show you everything…_ her loose hair lies in a curtain over your face and you remember the night you left for Amsterdam and helped her get ready to leave, feeling like you were both escaping, and she said, frustrated and nervous and rushing, _they put my hair in this fucking sailor’s knot Slava help me undo it_ while she tore through her closet to find suitable clothes for air travel. It all turned out for the best, you want to tell these versions of yourselves, only a few years ago, feeling like lifetimes ago. It all turned out for the best and sometimes that takes a while, and doesn’t feel perfect. On the wall opposite you, you can see the clock (12:41) and the moonlight shining through the window, illuminating the old snow on the streets, and even the glass windowpane looks peaceful, showing the new snow beginning to fall from the sky. You watch it until you fall asleep, and you have no problem getting to sleep.

_

When you wake up you’re not sure what time it is, only that the sky is a kind of pearl-gray, and you can see snow on the trees outside like powder. Next to you, Theodora is as fast asleep as you’ve ever seen her, still and curled up, her knees against your stomach. You’re still tired so you close your eyes and decide there will be no harm in sleeping late.

You wake up to her soft voice. “Shit,” she says, “we really slept this late….” It’s past ten, which is in the middle of her work day, or it would be were this not a Sunday.

You shrug. “We both needed it. Aren’t your feet cold?” you ask, seeing her bare feet hanging off the bed.

“Aren’t yours?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.

“Hey,” you say after a quiet moment, “I am glad you no longer blame yourself for your mother. I always tried to tell you it was not your fault. But some things, I guess, you cannot make someone believe, they have to do it on their own.”

She half-smiles at you, then looks away. “That makes a lot of sense,” she says. “I want to ask you something.”

“You do not have to ask me if you can ask,” you say.

“Do you remember my notebooks,” she begins, and before you can finish saying _of course_ , she continues on- “I have all of them here. I didn’t want to leave them back at Hobie’s place in case he ever stumbled upon them, he already has enough to worry about…I haven’t written one in a long time. I’ve been busy. I think I haven’t written one since…you know. Everything. The painting.”

You nod your head, already beginning to understand what she’s going to ask.

“I think…you should read them. Now that you’re…not doing what you used to anymore. And you should tell me about your life, too. Since we left each other, and what we never got to talk about when we were kids, and these past few years. If we’re going to….” She still can’t say things about how the two of you are, you notice, that, or she thinks it’s not necessary to try and describe things about yourselves to you. “We lived this long. So we can talk about it, I suppose.”

“Of course, Theodora,” you tell her, sitting up and grabbing onto her hands, trying to make it clear you’re as certain and earnest as you’ve ever been, “of course we will.”

For a moment she looks so sad you want to comfort her again, you see years’ worth of things she never told anyone the whole of, even you, maybe not even the notebooks. But then she closes her eyes, and opens them, and looks you dead in the face. “Listen, I know what I was like when I was in high school, so I also want you to promise not to make fun of any of the stupid things I wrote.”

You laugh. “If there was anything stupid written in there it was probably because of me!” and then, despite herself, she’s laughing too.

“I really fucking missed you, Slava,” she says, still laughing, but very serious. “I should get dressed. I think I was sick the last time I slept in like this.” She gets up and starts searching through her closet.

“So was I,” you recall the bathtub in Gyuri’s place, what little sleep you got. You’ll tell her about it, and she’ll tell you about what things were for her, all those pages, all those years. “A toast to good health.”

_

By the time she gets out of the bathroom, showered, dressed, and made up, it’s not actually as late as it seems- she’s very thorough when she gets ready now, you notice, not like the way it was when you were kids, getting dressed in the dark from piles of clothes on the floor, your old eyeliner still thick and smudged from yesterday, Theo getting ready with a little compact mirror on the bus, both of you taking quick showers to save the hot water in the bathroom by her room.

“Wow,” you say, “are you going somewhere nice?” She laughs a little. You like seeing her do that.

“I noticed you didn’t really bring much so feel free to borrow clothes from me,” Theo tells you, “I’m sure there’s something in there you’d like.”

“Don’t you remember how we wore each other’s clothes?” you say.

“Yeah. I remember that one math teacher that paid so little attention to the students that she would get us confused because I wore that Never Summer shirt one time,” Theo shakes her head remembering it.

“You must be a very good teacher,” you say, thinking of her teaching art classes, how she must know it so well, how students probably enjoy her class. How she must seem to them like one of the adults who doesn’t disregard what it is to be that age.

“I really do try,” she says. “You know, if we ever get around to going outside, we might end up running into one of my students. So behave,” she says with sternness that is only partially joking and you do a mockingly offended scoff.

“I am a good influence now! Between the two of us we could teach the youth so much about dog care, classic films, history of Dutch painting….” She’s smiling and shaking her head. You wonder if those girls you saw are her students. How many high schools are around here? You consider telling her about it, maybe later you will. By this time you find some worn jeans and a black velvet shirt with satiny ribbon trim. You can wear your jacket over it and it will be fine in this weather.

When you’re all set to go you say, “I guess we should have never stopped sharing clothes. You know, I still have the Versace dress I wore to your party. That would be incredible on you. But when we go to Vegas I have lots of things you can borrow that would look great-”

She shakes her head, trying not to laugh. “Oh, Slava, you really just never stop, do you?”

“No really. You look so beautiful. And I can tell you are more secure, in your being now. Not just in how you go about but the things you do and say.” You suddenly feel a flash of happiness, like some brightness overtaking you, it’s almost overwhelming. “I remember telling you once when we were children. _Princess you are a survivor! Live your life and no one can take your self from you! Fine, be sad, I am sad too, but that does not have to mean do not live!_ And now look at you.” She looks both startled and flustered.

“I…it’s all right,” she tells you, and you wonder if she thinks you’re about to cry, out of pride and relief for her, or out of misery about how fucked up your life has been, or both. Well, later, you’ll tell her about how fucked up it was exactly, and how it is now, and now will seem even better in comparison, and you’ll tell her she won’t have to worry anymore. Even if you’ll never stop thinking about the worst things that happened, they happened and at a point they stopped, and that counts for something. “I mean…thank you.” She shrugs, a rueful half-smile. “I guess sometimes I still don’t know what to say.”

“Well, sometimes it is difficult. I struggle too. Why do you think I say so much fucked up things? Anyway we do not have to just talk, talk, talk. Show me around town,” you tell her. “Like you wanted. The ocean. Anything you want me to see if it makes you happy.”

“Have you ever been to a beach in winter?” she asks. “Who am I kidding. You probably have…”

“I lied about swimming with alligators,” you say, reminded of the long-ago subject of your travels when it was new to both of you. “I wanted to impress you.”

Theodora smiles a little, looking down. “Yeah. After a while I kind of guessed that but didn’t say anything.”

“Ah, just bring me,” you tell her.

_

  
It’s still early enough in the morning that few people are out and not that many cars are parked by the beach. “There are people who come to get seaglass but they come even earlier in the morning,” Theodora explains. “Seaglass is a lot different from antiques,” she says wryly, “anyone can tell the real thing from a fake, and everyone knows and buys them when they come on vacation. The fakes are always too perfect, too uniform. Go to most of the beach towns in this state and they’ll tell you the same.” She says it like a conspirator, opening the door. Down a ways you can see a couple of guys fishing at the seashore.

In the cool winter morning, the sea is an icy blue, the sky a soft greyish color, like Theo’s sweater. A small dusting of snow coats the dunes and the grasses that are by the sands, damp with the tide. “This isn’t the one the tourists come to,” she explains, “but I doubt that one’s very crowded right now either.”

As you walk onto the sands, you feel your soles sink in a little, so you take off your shoes and socks and walk barefoot. “Be careful. The rocks and shells can be pretty sharp,” she tells you lightly, and she’s right, but it isn’t too bad. You’re both quiet, walking over the sands. You don’t see any seaglass- it must have been picked up by jewelers and artists and collectors already.

“The other night I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep,” Theodora begins, raising her voice a little over the wind. “I was just awake for hours. So I got dressed and came down here. I listened to the sea and I saw the moon and I – I don’t know. I felt all right. I can’t tell you why I decided to come here but when I did, it felt like it was the best thing I could have done.”

You don’t know exactly what to say to her. So you walk to the edge of the water and put your feet in. The cool water, the ice blue with its snow-white foam, washes over your toes, the sand dense and gritty beneath your feet. A little of the water gets on the hems of your pant legs, which aren’t yours, and you will apologize for it, they can just be washed, and you doubt she’d be too annoyed by it because it seems like she never wears them. You can smell the sharp, clean scent of new snow, the thick brine of the sea. “Come,” you turn around and tell her.

She looks at you for a moment. “All right,” she says softly, taking off her boots and socks, then rolling up her pants, walking carefully to the water. She stands perfectly still as the small, rippling waves go over her feet, her ankles. Her eyes are closed, peacefully, like she doesn’t care about the cold. You realize now that you don’t think she’s running now. Maybe she won’t be here forever, but maybe she won’t be anywhere forever, maybe most people aren’t after all. A home may not be forever, but it can still be a home, you think you’re realizing, even if you already lived the truth of that, years ago. You think of this as you let her stand still, thinking of whatever she needs to think about between her and the universe.

“It’s cold,” she says, “but honestly in New England seawater isn’t that warm in the summer anyway. I don’t mind it,” she adds.

When she opens her eyes you’re right there. “Later today when we are done with whatever it is you would like to do,” you say, “if you will accept, I would like to come home with you.” You could stay at one of the motels, but you know that once you’ve brought up the subject, she won’t let you.

“I want you to come home with me too,” she says, looking at you, her eyes wide and full, like she knows secrets that she’ll share with you if you just keep listening.

“Are you happy here?” you ask her.

“I think,” she says after a moment, “I’m close enough to being happy now that I may as well be.” You hear seagulls, and cars driving on the road. “I mean. I think I’m all right.” A lightness in her voice, something you only hear rarely from her, but you know to recognize it.

You can picture yourselves a year from now- you’re not entirely sure where either of you will be, but that’s fine. It’s an open slot and not an abyss this time, the months ahead. Maybe you will be opening a club in New York or Vegas or Miami or Berlin and you’ll invite Theodora to the opening night and she’ll come. Maybe she’ll be back in New York or maybe she’ll still be here or she’ll go between or she’ll end up staying in Kansas. Maybe when the two of you fly to Vegas soon the experience will make you realize something that will set you on the course for the rest of your life- but it will probably not, and it will still be worth going. Maybe one day you will go to California together. But you don’t think either of you will ever have to run away to any place anymore. You think in a way you were running away when she left Vegas- not just because you didn’t follow, but because you let her go without knowing the truth, and you never told her the truth before. Maybe, you think, running away isn’t just something that happens when you do it, but something that you continue when your feet are in place, if you don’t know how to stop, and it gets you stuck no matter where you are. But now, you do know, and you think you can go anywhere, and stay anywhere, but right now, you are fine with being here.

Theodora turns to look at you. “Come on,” she tells you, holding her shoes, the sand clinging to her feet as she begins to walk back to her car. You follow her, your ankles sinking into the cold sand as you drag your feet through it. “There’s a lot we can do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.


End file.
